How to Automate eBay Shipping (North America)

If you've ever run an eBay business, you'll know how time consuming the shipping process can be. The time you use to ship products could be much better spent in business growth activities, such as product research and acquisition. Luckily, there are steps you can take that will minimize the time you spend on shipping your eBay items and free you up to work on other things.

There are three main elements to eBay shipping: Wrapping and boxing, label printing and application, and delivery to shipper. The more you can do to automate these tasks the better. For wrapping and boxing there are two options. You can either hire someone to do it for you or you can do it yourself. Do it yourself until your shipping volume reaches the point where you need help. There's no point in having an employee if you only ship 5 items per week.

1. Set up a packing station. A great way to make wrapping and packaging easier and more effective is to set up a professional packaging station in your home. You'll find that having all your tape, boxes, cutters and other tools in one organized, well-lit work space can work wonders. Stick with this home wrapping station until you reach 5-10 sales a day. At this point you can hire someone to do your shipping for you.
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   Do some label printing. Both UPS and the United States Postal Service offer quick and easy label printing. This allows you to print shipping labels directly from their website. Obviously, a lot easier than manually typing in customers addresses into a document then printing it.
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   Deliver. Delivery to the shipper is quite easy to time manage. Instead of sending out orders every day of the week, try shipping only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This will provide your customers with speedy shipping and greatly reduce the number of trips you need to take back and forth from your shipper. As time goes on, you can have an employee take over this task as well. Also, with shipping, USPS has a service where they will actually pick up your flat rate boxes that need to be shipped. You can look into this as well.