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Wayne - You ask an age old question "Free Shipping or Not". All online retailers face this issue. I am all for a flat rate charge based on weight until your order hits a certain weight then use UPS only to calculate shipping based on weight and zip and do not mark it up. Thus your "item setup" should include weight. I believe this way you will lose some and win some on the lighter stuff and never on the heavy stuff. As mentioned USPS Priority is the best way to ship your light weight items and in my experience has never been an issue for shippers and customers. UPS is a great service but gets real expensive fast especially if you start trying to profit off of it (so don't). With as much shipping as you do I suspect UPS offers you discount rates on some services so pass those along. If you currently use multiple shipping services (Fedex Ground & UPS Ground) ditch Fedex Ground to increase your UPS volume. FedEx's independent ground delivery drivers are not timely and sloppy.
If you do not stock an item why sell it? OK, maybe you want to provide that service or be perceived as the end-all site (that is is fine and dandy and helpful to us) just do not charge for shipping from the third party warehouse and you eat it (since your profiting from never even carrying that inventory). You did nothing on that item except list it on your site. I like what you do already and how the site is laid out etc. Keep up the great work! As for international shipping, I suspect that is eating up a lot of time and money. I would think long and hard about how to tackle international shipping without it affecting your domestic shipping costs.
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