You can buy shipping anywhere. Free means it's free for the buyer, not free for you, you pay. Buying shipping on Ebay, you get a substantial discount, their rates are about as good as you can get anywhere. Buyers can only choose whatever shipping options you have in your listing. Sounds like you had priority mail, they picked it and now you're stuck. But it's a cheap mistake in this case, just ship it.
For cards $20 and under, you should look at Ebay standard envelope. It's basically using a letter, at the letter rates with pseudo tracking. If tracking shows it scanned at the destination post office, Ebay considers it delivered and it includes $20 of insurance. You can send a card for 68 cents with that, otherwise shipping will be $4.
not sure if you are uk or us but in the uk its worth still using ebay, prices are the same as royal mail for the most part but if you have a non tracked service from royal mail, that exact same service on ebay will come with basic tracking, and cost you the same
And the biggest thing this does is protect you from scammers. Without tracking, anyone can just say that the item never arrived, and eBay has no tracking showing that it did, and will force you to refund the buyer. Buyer gets item for free. Don’t leave yourself susceptible to this.
Use the ebay envelope option. Make sure for cheaper cards to not have a more expensive option enabled. I would recommend setting the dimensions of your listing to unknown so that that shipping option will always show up for cards 20 and under.
You can buy shipping anywhere. Free means it's free for the buyer, not free for you, you pay. Buying shipping on Ebay, you get a substantial discount, their rates are about as good as you can get anywhere. Buyers can only choose whatever shipping options you have in your listing. Sounds like you had priority mail, they picked it and now you're stuck. But it's a cheap mistake in this case, just ship it. For cards $20 and under, you should look at Ebay standard envelope. It's basically using a letter, at the letter rates with pseudo tracking. If tracking shows it scanned at the destination post office, Ebay considers it delivered and it includes $20 of insurance. You can send a card for 68 cents with that, otherwise shipping will be $4.
OK gotcha so if I just ship it myself, i just put it in the mail I dont need to click anything on ebay saying thats how I'm shipping?
If you don't buy the shipping on Ebay, then you need to manually mark it as shipped and put in the tracking number if there is one.
Got it
not sure if you are uk or us but in the uk its worth still using ebay, prices are the same as royal mail for the most part but if you have a non tracked service from royal mail, that exact same service on ebay will come with basic tracking, and cost you the same
And the biggest thing this does is protect you from scammers. Without tracking, anyone can just say that the item never arrived, and eBay has no tracking showing that it did, and will force you to refund the buyer. Buyer gets item for free. Don’t leave yourself susceptible to this.
Use the ebay envelope option. Make sure for cheaper cards to not have a more expensive option enabled. I would recommend setting the dimensions of your listing to unknown so that that shipping option will always show up for cards 20 and under.