As you may already know, Royal Mail will be increasing their postal rates in early April this year.
From Monday 6th April 2009 you can expect to pay more to send parcels and letters, so you may want to familiarise yourselves with what awaits.
The Royal Mail have already updated their internet site with a downloadable .pdf document which contains the details of the new postal prices.
Once the prices go up, it will also be important to ensure that your AbeBooks Shipping Matrix is up-to-date with any changes you wish to make. You can adjust your shipping to reflect the new postal prices at any time.
As many booksellers use different shipping services and have to ship to many different countries, we offer a flexible Shipping Matrix. The matrix allows you to add or update the information according to the services you use and the countries to which you most often sell.
Offering accurate rates and speeds for each country will make sure that your listings are more competitive and that buyers return to buy more of your books. You can also avoid refunds from processing too soon by setting more realistic shipping speeds.
Did you know..?
- You can add more countries to your matrix so that you can offer
more accurate shipping for each country to which you ship. You will
find the standard
AbeBooks countries on the matrix. All other countries will come under the International shipping rates and speeds, unless you add each country separately with the appropriate rates and speeds. We recommend that you add those countries from which you regularly receive orders.
- You can increase or decrease the shipping rates according to the shipping services you use (both standard and priority). AbeBooks has a default shipping rate that all booksellers are welcome to use. However, those rates can be changed at any time to be more accurate to the services you offer.
- Not only can you change the rates, you can also change the speeds according to the shipping service you use. You know best what delivery times your shipping services offer - update your shipping matrix to reflect those too.
NOTE: Any changes to the Shipping Matrix will be updated on your account immediately, but may take longer to appear online in your inventory - make sure you allow a few days for the changes to go through.
When processing an order, every bookseller has the chance to increase or reduce the shipping if they have an item which is smaller, larger or more valuable than the average order, and the default shipping therefore either too high or low.
This function is available at the order processing stage of an order. For more information visit our online help pages:
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