I’ve been slowly trying to clean out my apartment of all the various excesses that I have accumulated. When my last roommate moved in, it was sort of a last minute thing, so anything I had stored in the spare bedroom closet got crammed into any space I could possibly find. When she left, I pulled a bunch of that stuff out and put it back into the spare bedroom. Now it looks like I might be getting another roommate this summer, so not only do I need to clean out that room again, this time I actually have time to go through things.
I’m not a fan of throwing away things that are usable, so I’ve been putting stuff up onto eBay. Usually, I just agree to ship to the U.S., but since I work by a post office, I figured it wasn’t too hard to ship out of the country. So I recently listed something worldwide. I used eBay’s shipping calculator to figure out how much it would cost to ship and didn’t worry about it. According to eBay, it would cost $18 to ship to the international buyer.
When bidding ended and the purchase was paid for, I took the item to the post office to ship. And it cost $32 to ship. Nowhere near the $18 that I was told. Thankfully, the final bid was high enough that I didn’t lose money, but when it was all said and done, I really didn’t make much money on the sale either.
So now I know better. If I ship internationally, I’m adding a $20 fee to the eBay calculated shipping rate. I don’t like to overcharge for shipping, but I don’t want to take a huge hit either!
(Really? You don’t want to win a book?)
