In this article we will be sharing how you can do discounted rates for shipping items to your customers as well as how to get USPS free shipping supplies right to your doorstep.
Initially when I started selling online I was using USPS straigh with no discounts, nothing, because nobody shared with me what I will share with you in this article. I could have saved so much money, but it’s alright we live and we learn, right?
I’m going to share with you how I get discounted rates and how to get free usps shipping supplies sent right to my doorstep Alright guys so now you just want to go on usps.com, go over to their website and then you’re going to look for stamps and supplies and then you’re going to scroll down and you’ll see somewhere where it says free shipping supplies, here is the direct link at the time of this writing. Free Shipping Supplies
Then what you’re going to do is once you click on get free shipping supplies, you’ll see a list of different packaging and a variety of different boxes that you can select to be shipped to your house.
So you want to go ahead and just scroll and see you know what exactly it is that you want to order. I always have a variety of boxes on hand.
You can always order and see which one works for you but these are what I use to ship my products in. I usually use a priority mail flat rate envelope, so that’s exactly I’m going to get here.
You can see that it’s a pack of ten so I go down and I select how many of the pack of tens that I want and I’m going to get. Well I usually use these a lot so I tend to order a bunch of these. If you need questions about the description you can scroll down and look at the description. I’m going to go ahead and grab let’s just say 3
So I’ll put three add to my cart and I keep shopping. I’m going to go back to the supplies and then I’m going to scroll down. It’s best to just click on the product type we’ll just free shipping supplies so you don’t go ahead and order something that you know you have to spend money for. That’s usually what I do, I click on free shipping supplies, scroll down to see what I want to use next and then I’m definitely use the Priority Mail padded flat rate envelope. I’m going to use that when I ship out two of my products, so I’m going to go ahead and grab that and that ships in a pack of ten and a pack of fifteen.
So, you can go ahead and see full details, do the same thing, you add the quantity number that you want. I’m going to get four of the packs of fifteen and I’m just going to keep on shopping. So, back to the supply site and then I’m going to go ahead and let’s see. I’m looking for the the large flat rate boxes; so I’m going to go ahead and get the flat rate box. The large flat rate box now ships in a pack of 25. I’m going to do this when I ship ten of my orders. Ten usually goes in this box; I usually get this box. I added that to my cart, you can get priorty mail stickers, you can get special handling fragile, you can get even address labels.
The small custom declaration pouch is for when you print a label from your computer and you just want to put the slip inside of it you can go ahead and do that. It’s going to be a clear slip so you just put the paper label into the slip and you stick the slip onto the box. So this is great if you don’t have a thermal printer that sticks, you can just print on paper and throw the paper in this slip so this is what I used to use before I got the printer.
Alright so this one always has a limit. You can only get five so you get fifty per order. I’m going to look for the medium flat rate. I get a bunch of these because I ship a lot of six-packs. Looking for that but they have a bunch of stuff. Everything like certified mail receipts; everything you need from USPS they have online so this is really a great resource to utilize.
So in my example here this is what I ordered.
- Priority Mail Padded Flat Rate Envelope – $7.75 W/ Discount
- Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope – $7.15 W/ Discount
- Priority Mail Tyvek ailing envelope – Price varies by weight
- Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box – $13.20 W/ Discount
- Priority Mail Large Flat Rate Box – $ 18.30 W/Discount
- Medium VS Large Flat Rate Box – Size Comparison
This is also great to have one of these (United Staes Postal Service’s crate). You can ask for one of these at your post office. This is just carrier. They can give you a bunch of these so you can put all your orders in here and you just load it up car. Once you’re done ordering everything you need you just go ahead and check out and that’s it.
My products don’t need customized packaging so that’s why I use USPS packaging and when I don’t use USPS packaging, I use UPS but I’ll have those already prepackaged in a brown box. But these are great guys, you can package it neatly inside the box, you can actually put your cute design stuff in the box if you want to be cheaper especially by weight. So these are flat rate. I always do flat rate because shipping anything over 1 pound using and something like ten dollars but you can save money by just using the flat rate boxes.
So what you have to do is pretty much going to stamp.com and then it’ll prompt you to go to ship station and with ship station, you can literally connect your store to do this. I use WooCommerce, I know Shopify you can actually print your labels through them but I just go in a ship station and print out my labels from there. I just like to see where everything is. It’s just so organized. I’m telling you guys, I used to use USPS and I was spending so much money because I was paying the regular rate but with ship station you get a discounted price. It’s amazing guys.
Some of my customers have been so discouraging buying a large quantity only because the shipping rates were so high, so now I’ve contacted them again two other no listen shipping rates have gone down let’s go let’s get it let’s get this money in they’re so happy. If you need to provide your customers with the best pricing with shipment this video is perfect for you.
I’m going to show you guys how to do the orders, I’m going to walk you through it. If this is something that you feel like I can’t do; don’t worry, take your time. Like this is something that you will figure out. You have to give yourself patience and time to do it, it’s a learning process. You won’t just learn this all in one day and just become the best and the expert at it; it takes time. I’ve been doing this for over two years now so I’m pretty much very familiar with how to ship products.
Now we’re going to log in to ship station; let’s start a new order together. We’re going to go to new order and then we’re going to just input all the information that we need for this customer’s order. Let’s just make it up so we’re going to say the shiping paid was eight dollars, the tax is a dollar forty cent, and then the total pay was twenty nine dollars and forty cents just for the total of everything. So you’re going to fill out the name, their address and you’re going to go down to order line items and put exactly what it is that they ordered.
Alright, so now you can see you know where is it going, make sure the address is validated and their email and then you can see what item you’re sending out to them. It has everything there listed out; from product, to tax, to everything. So now we’re going to select a service we’re going to ship but let’s just say for this example we’re going to use USPS priority mail and then we’re going to ship it in a flat-rate envelope and it tells me that the rate is seven dollars and fifteen cents.
Usually for confirmation I’d like to put the delivery confirmation. I think I forgot to do it here. I usually like to compare pricing just to see if I did it a different way, if I used UPS crown shipping would it be cheaper but here you can see that it’s actually more expensive. And see? Using just a USPS priority mail is definitely more expensive than using a flat rate envelope so that’s why I like to do flat rate envelopes.
So now we’re just going to create and print the label and then just going to print it and stick it to the box and there you go. And like I was saying before you can actually go and stamps.com and do this because stamps.com is actually connected to ship stations. Sometimes when I’m having a problem using ship station I’ll just go on stamps.com, so you can see the breakdown at the different pricing instead of flat rate envelope it tells you all the details next to it so you just hover over it and you can see all the details. If you have questions about the packaging, can you use it or not all the information is right over when you hover over it.
So I showed you guys how you can go right ahead online and order these free shipping supplies right from the comfort of your home. If you have any questions about stamps.com, ship station or about how to get them free boxes on USPS, please feel free to DM me on Instagram and let me know. I’ll be glad to help you out. I know it can be very challenging especially if you’re new to online business, especially if you don’t know how to connect your store to the software, it can be hectic okay, trust me I get it.
Watch videos online before you contact me though because it’s online. Everything that you need to know is online. Like how to plug your store and all the stuff you learnt online, so feel free to contact me if you have any questions additional to anything that I’ve explained to you.
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