Question about shipping t-shirts

Legal Size Flat Rate Priority mailers. Your local PO will only stock the Letter size FR, but you can order the Legal size online, and USPS will deliver them to you for free. The weight limit is 70 pounds (right), you can fit a hoodie or quite a few T-shirts in a Legal FR mailer. Postage via eBay, Etsy, Stamps.com, etc is $6.65 to $6.85. If you fit 10 shirts in there, that is $0.68 a shirt.

The Letter sized FR are useful too, and cost a little less to mail, but the Legal size are the ticket for larger orders.

TIP Waste a few of the mailers (they ARE free) practicing folding and fitting stuff into them. I only recently realized that I could fit a 3X hoodie in a Legal FR. I've simply gotten better at it since I originally evaluated what would fit, so practice a bit!

I also offer free shipping (I'm in the UK) and just send out multiple packages if it works out cheaper for me.

BadZebedee said:

I also offer free shipping (I'm in the UK) and just send out multiple packages if it works out cheaper for me.

Click to expand...

Excellent point. Nothing wrong with splitting your heavier packages into 2 or 3 smaller packages to keep each one under a pound. We can routinely save several dollars an order doing this, even taking into account the extra cost of additional labels, shipping bags, tape, etc.

For heavier packages, UPS or Fedex Ground will be cheaper to ship especially when talking about dozens of shirts.

Thanks guys! I was looking at one of my competitor's website and was puzzled.
Basically, I added 12 t-shirts to the cart, and when checking out, it says free shipping for the 12 t-shirts.
The shipping is via USPS First Class, so I was wondering how do they achieve that, since the weight limit for USPS First Class is around 13 oz, and 12 t-shirts weight much more than that.

I guess maybe they split it into different shipments.

Nikar said:

Thanks guys! I was looking at one of my competitor's website and was puzzled.
Basically, I added 12 t-shirts to the cart, and when checking out, it says free shipping for the 12 t-shirts.
The shipping is via USPS First Class, so I was wondering how do they achieve that, since the weight limit for USPS First Class is around 13 oz, and 12 t-shirts weight much more than that.

Click to expand...

Because that's easier to say that than to say "first class under a pound, priority mail over a pound".

The cutoff for first class is 15.9 ounces, not 13, when you use a Commercial account, like through Paypal.

My go-to for multiple shirts is the padded priority mailer enevelope (i like the way it survives better that the tag board legal envelope), if the order is bigger than I move up to a regional rate A box. When figuring cost keep in mind that if you have figured first class rates into the price of your product, you will actually come out ahead with mutiple shirts in a priority mailer. As NoXId pointed out, the more shirts in the package the lower the shipping cost per shirt.

KelceyW said:

My go-to for multiple shirts is the padded priority mailer enevelope (i like the way it survives better that the tag board legal envelope), if the order is bigger than I move up to a regional rate A box. When figuring cost keep in mind that if you have figured first class rates into the price of your product, you will actually come out ahead with mutiple shirts in a priority mailer. As NoXId pointed out, the more shirts in the package the lower the shipping cost per shirt.

Click to expand...

Thanks, for your case, if the customer orders many t-shirts which exceed the allowable weight of USPS First Class, you split that into multiple packages? Because if an order contains 8 tshirts, it's going to be over the USPS First Class weight limit even if you pack all those into a rate A box.

I don't split them up. The padded envelope and Rate A box are both Priority mail, if it fits it ships. I end up paying less per shirt to mail than if each went singy at first class.