Recently I've been confronted with shipping. Generally, shipping on the things I sell at auction is either obvious or non-existent. Cell phone boosters, for example. I ended up with a huge stash of them and thought I'd experiment and see how they sold. Shipping those was obvious: put it in an envelope, slap a 37-cent stamp on there, and you're good to go.

eBooks and books-on-CD are even easier. Shipping them is easy or non-existent. I either email them to the winning bidder or put them in a hard envelope for $1.58 (plus the envelope, of course) and they're done. I ship CDs as a part of my daily business anyway - I usually burn finished projects onto CD to ship to my clients.

Finally, there are regular music CDs. I bought a box full of closeouts after having a lot of success with a box of closeouts I'd been sent in trade for a small job I'd done. Those ship in bubble wrap envelopes for $1.98. In fact, I no longer have to weigh them at the Mail Boxes Etc. I frequent. I just hand it over and say, "that one's a buck-ninety-eight" and they nod. It's routine.

Now, though, there are new things going on - things I thought were also obvious, but it turns out they aren't. My wife makes baby quilts and I've been selling them on eBay for her. She apparently likes this arrangement since every time I try to show her how to post them for sale herself, she conveniently has "something come up."

At any rate, these, I thought, are light and fit in small boxes when rolled or folded tightly. Great, now we can start using up that closet full of boxes I've been collecting from eBay and Amazon.com purchases.

Well, not so fast. I took the first quilt we'd sold (at a $3 profit - not great, but better than I'd really expected for the first try) to the MBE and they put it on the scale. The cheapest form of shipping was regular mail at $9. Woah! I'd only charged $5 for shipping. This means we lost our three dollar profit PLUS another dollar.

I hurriedly went home and made changes to the two others still up for auction. Luckily, I was able to change them before any bids had been made. Whew!

I learned something, though. It pays to do some research. From now on whenever I put anything up for auction (currently it's bundles of books on CD rather than one at a time), I now box it up with an address in Florida (as far away from me as I can get while still in the continental US) and take it with me on my my daily trip to MBE to get a price on shipping.

A little research pays off. You can also weigh items yourself and call the Post Office, Mail Boxes Etc., UPS, etc. and get an estimate on the charges. All you need are two ZIP codes (to and from) and the item weight. You may also need approximate dimensions of the parcel - especially with UPS.

Check out your shipping charges and make sure you know what you'll pay. This is especially true for International shipping - which I always quote on a case-by-case through bidder inquiries rather than a blanket number. Shipping is one of the most important parts of selling online - whether it be at online auction or through a website.