eBay does not care if you have a printer or not. They don't care about you at all. All they care about is generating short term profits so eBay management meets it internal goals so eBay management get their bonuses.
Rule No. 1 is do not believe anything eBay or PayPal says!
This is after all the same company that produced the infamous video about how to use calculated shipping.
For long term sellers here that video is a tragic comedy as its chunk full of so many hilarious slapstick gags.
I am still laughing at point in the video where they tell you to prepackage your item in order to know what its going to weigh. Thats funny!
Buy yourself a monotone laser printer. Buy a printer with a separate drum and toner cartridge so you don't need to change the drum each time you change the toner cartridge. Buy a high capacity toner cartridge as that will print many thousands of labels. Print your labels on plain laser / copier paper, two to a page. Use standard 2" clear packaging tape to adhere the labels to boxes. Apply the tape evenly over the labels - wrinkles in the tape can interfere with some scanning equipment, especially the older equipment. Make sure your labels are crisp as blurry labels can interfere with scanning equipment. Laser printers use heat to fuse the toner to the page and are faster than inkjets. Inkjet labels may run if they get wet. Instead of paying $30 for a inkjet cartridge that can easily get clogged and runs out quickly you could buy a large capacity toner cartridge that will print 20,000 eBay labels.
Free shipping is going to raise prices for buyers. Its a marketing ploy by eBay to raises prices so they make more money! Remember rule #1 from above!
Logically think about what free shipping involves instead of jumping on eBay's bandwagon.
You are going to have to add the cost of zone 9 shipping to the cost of the item. You are forcing all buyers to pay zone 9 shipping regardless of where they live. Does that make sense? But eBay and PayPal charge you a fee on that shipping so you just can't add eBay's commercial rate to the price of the item unless you want to loose money on the item. You need to add the commercial rate plus an additional amount to cover those fees. The easiest way to do that is change your eBay preferences to charge customers the retail rate while you pay the commercial rate. The difference between the two should cover these fees in most cases. The difference might not cover these fees for some smaller items so add additional amount to the item price (i.e., $1.00, $2.00, etc..).
When USPS updates its rates you will need to edit every single one of your unsold items if you use free shipping. The scenario above in conjunction with calculated shipping saves you from editing your unsold listings as eBay will update the retail and commercial rates automatically.
https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/notice123.pdf
Retail:
Commercial:
As a general rule 10% is a good overall guide; however, some categories have a 12% fee.
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/selling-fees?id=4364
Since you are new eBay, eBay is giving you commercial rates with $50 insurance. You can import your orders at Pirateship and get commercial rates with $100 insurance and cubic pricing for small Priority Mail items of 1/2 square foot or less. After you become Top Rated switch to eBay labels for commercial rates less a 3% discount and $100 insurance. Pirateship's cubic rate may still be cheaper for some small items.
Use GarageSale to manage your listing if you have a Macintosh. It runs circles around eBay's own dinosaur tools.
