Handmades Selling: To Add Shipping or To Charge Shipping

As a handmades seller, I've been skimpy on shipping  insurance in the past, but I always knew it was a good thing to do, the best practice. Now that I mostly use Flat Rate packaging, insurance it is included along with tracking too. I still use calculated shipping too, for anything that I can mail in manila envelopes. I try to always add insurance now, unless it is paper crafting. Even then, some paper crafted products I buy insurance for.

Buyers do like to see free shipping in the listings, just as we do when we shop. Many sellers roll the shipping into the price and call it free shipping. I do find this a little difficult to do with lower-priced products, because the price seems too high with the shipping folded in. With higher-priced handmades it's easier to merge in the shipping charges.

Most handmades selling venues are encouraging sellers to offer free shipping as a standard. I read an article at Etsy recently that made me start thinking a little differently about this contentious issue. It said they want us to think of the shipping cost as one of the overall costs of production and roll it into the product price. They said the belief by sellers that buyers need to know the costs of shipping and how it affects all of us doesn't seem to matter anymore. They also stated that buyers don't care about that, and that they also don't want to pay more shipping than they would pay themselves.

I never thought of the shipping charges as one of the pre-expenses. The Etsy article did help me to consider something that I never have before, that rolling in the shipping charges doesn't have to feel like deceit. That is good, because it seems to be more apparent than ever that shoppers prefer free shipping, however they can get it!