Posted by I’m always looking for a way to save a few bucks, so I do a lot of bargain hunting on shopgoodwill.com. I recently came across a way to save on the cost of shipping. I won an auction on two items from the same Goodwill seller. On the payments page, I selected the first item, and it took me to a page where it asked if I wanted to combine shipping. I selected my other item, and the next screen added the weight and gave me a total payment for both items. Instead of paying $20 in shipping fees, it was reduced to $10.70. I basically got the second item with free shipping.
I was aware that you could combine shipping but had never tried it. Mainly, because most of the time my orders are from different locations. There is a limitation on how many items you can combine (20) and a total weight limit you can’t exceed. They also total the handling fee for each item. So, if you have 2 items and the handling fee is $3 on each item, the total handling fee would be $6. The savings is all in the Fedex shipping fee. The fact that they have one box to ship instead of two makes a big difference. It’s not only weight, but the size of the box can also impact shipping costs. So, combined shipping works best for smaller items.
The second time I tried combined shipping, I won an auction but then had to shop for a second item from the same seller. They give you 7 days to pay for your item after you win an auction. So, the next day I used an advanced search to show me items that were under $20 from the same Goodwill seller. The list was sorted by auctions that were ending first. I was looking for items that could be resold on Ebay and found a few that didn’t have any bids yet. All of the items that I selected were due to close that evening. With two hours left I put in a bid on one of the items. The next morning, I found that I had won the auction and was able to combine shipping with the auction I had won on the previous day.