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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Lehigh96, post: 1805754, member: 15309&quot;]I think you make a very valid point.&nbsp; Everyone needs to customize their selling decisions based on their products and average fee percentages.&nbsp; Here is what I mean.</p><p><br /></p><p>The real reason to offer free shipping to your customers is to obtain &quot;Top Rated&quot; seller status which yields a 20% discount on FVF &amp; better exposure in E-Bay searches.&nbsp; That 20% discount is equal to 1.2% of the item price based on an E-Bay Store fee of 6%.&nbsp; But if your selling model is a lot of low value coins and your average item price is $10, then the base shipping cost of $1.69 represents 16.9% of your total item price.&nbsp; It makes absolutely no sense to offer free shipping to get a 1.2% discount while in the process giving away 16.9%.</p><p><br /></p><p>However, if you have an E-Bay coin store that sells mostly higher priced coins with an average item price of $200, then the 1.2 % discount nets you a savings of $2.40 while the $1.69 shipping only represents 0.845% of your total item cost.&nbsp; Now I know what you guys are going to say, what about insurance and signature confirmation costs?&nbsp; Signature confirmation costs $2.10 for any coin valued over and as a seller you must buy that in order to comply with E-Bay rules in case a seller decides to try to rip you off which happens frequently.&nbsp; So if you want to add those costs into the fold factoring what percentage of your coins sell for more than $250, be my guest. </p><p><br /></p><p>But the biggest ripoff on E-Bay is insuring your coins.&nbsp; The chance that the USPS is going to lose or damage your coin that is packaged securely in a padded mailer with a barcoded label is less than 1%, and I submit that it is far less than 1%, but lets use 1% for arguments sake.&nbsp; I submit that people should self insure (ship w/o insurance) unless the price of the coin represents more than 1% of your yearly sales.&nbsp; The math is complicated, and will vary from seller to seller, but each seller should determine their own threshold for purchasing insurance.&nbsp; But I promise you, if you are purchasing insurance for coins valued less than $100, you are absolutely losing money.</p><p><br /></p><p>I guess the point of this really long post is that there is no easy answer to what you should do as an E-Bay seller.&nbsp; It is very much like the rest of life, it all depends on your circumstances.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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