Trade me applying fees on top of shipping... what do you

Lorayne, there are many ways to do things, and everyone does it differently. What I do is make the shipping cost not too off putting by charging too much. If it's a reasonable price people are more likely to buy.

I make things easy by just having one shipping price nationwide and don't charge extra for rural. I find this encourages people to buy more and makes it an easy choice for buyers to choose. I don't get often get buyers choosing the wrong shipping option.

I also only charge 1 price and don't charge extra for combining no matter how many items, so this often works out as quite a discount for buyers if they purchase more items as although it's obviously going to cost me more, it's my way of giving the buyer a discount for the larger purchase.

I've just done a few bookings today for orders to go out tomorrow and although my shipping options on these ranged from $4.15 to my maximum of $5.95 nationwide, the actual cost for the bookings for me ranged from $3.95 to $22.15. Overall, I was down in my shipping cost recovery, but sales were up.

It's good to have a look and see what others selling similar items to you are doing for shipping, to see if you can work things for a point of difference, not just the price.

It is what it is unfortunately. 

Depends a lot on the items you are selling, people seem to often not really understand that the price of an item does not reflect the price to ship an item. 

A $1 item with $10 shipping is seen as outrageous, while a $100 item with $10 shipping is seen as perfectly acceptable.

If you are selling mostly items of a good value then a flat rate average shipping is a good way to go.  Unfortunately for me it's not the case, if I offer flat rate for both urban and rural (as I have in the past when it was much cheaper) then I get a lot of rural buyers spending a dollar on some item, and costing me 2 or 3 times the amount receievd just to ship it.

I've thought about switching to Aramex and I could probably near halve my shipping fees, but NZ Post is so fast and reliable on average (almost always next day or day after) that I think it would produce a worse result for customers.

It all makes it much more difficult to compete against the dropshi..ers with their cheap shipping from China.

Trade Me needs a filter/sort for delivery time.  They have the data they need now!

Lorayne.  Yes, every bodies shipping costs have gone up, unfortunately like everything else we buy. In reality unless you increase shipping, you will be making less and less on each sale. Also at present the general sentiment from sellers is that sales are going down generally. Mortgage rates, fuel, food and infact most things have seen considerable rises so people have less disposable income now after paying for essentials. 

When setting your shipping price, be aware shipping cost is not just the courier ticket price, it includes all the other costs involved in the shipping activity. This may be wrapping paper, boxes, pallet wrap, buckles, boxes, strapping, tape, bubble wrap, labels, doculopes, satchels, cardboard as well as an incremental cost attributed to machinery/tools used in the process such as tape guns, label printers, strapping machines, pens, vivids, printers and printer ink. Obviously each parcel will have different usage of these materials which cannot be individually calculated, but need to work out an average price/ parcel

I pass all the shipping onto the customer including the extra success fees for that shipping