Shipping charge strategy

[***www.amber-moon.com***]

This is probably not a new or rare subject here, but I'm hoping for some ideas from more experienced sellers.
We're selling mostly flat and unbreakable items that we could charge ~$10 for, and our typical buyers would normally need several different types of these products. So it would be a good idea to incentivise them to buy several in one order. 
We'd like to offer free shipping to make our listings look more appealing, not least on Google shopping, so we priced them ~$12 and sent them as untracked letters for a while. That generated good sales but also many lost shipments and emails from ebay asking to only send tracked. Now we went back to eparcel and increased the price to cover the extra costs and the sales went down again. we could offer the products at $10 and charge shipping at cost which would suit buyers that buy multiple items at once and only pay one shipping fee, but then our listings would not be "free shipping" listings any more.
Questions: has anyone gone to the trouble trying every possible scenario and worked out the perfect balance of price and shipping charge?

[p9games]

I sell trading cards which can be shipped nicely in envelopes.  I do free freight on everything, and factor freight costs into each item.  Often people will order multiple items, 5, 10, 20 or more.  I occasionally track my effective postage cost per item based on the mix of orders I get.

My listings offer tracked postage free for orders over $20, and express for over $200.  Express and Tracked are options at the buyers expense if they want.  About 3% to 5% of orders the buyer pays for Express, and a lower percentage upgrade to tracked (even on orders over $20, it seems nobody actually reads listings)

In terms of lost shipments my rate of lost, untracked items is lower than 1 in 500.  Most of my orders are to repeat customers (about 80% of my orders each day are from existing customers, with 20% coming from new customers).  I think this helps cut down on fraudulent INR claims.  If you're getting a materially higher INR rate on untracked items I'd say people are scamming you

[lezned-toycollector]

About 3% to 5% of orders the buyer pays for Express, and a lower percentage upgrade to tracked (even on orders over $20, it seems nobody actually reads listings)

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This type of thinking really astounds me. I always ponder if such people expect others to pay for their groceries, or their car rego, or power bill, or phone bill, etc..

Why do you think a buyer would want to upgrade their shipping  to include tracking? They are already guaranteed a full refund if the item doesn't arrive.

Tracking is for the sender's benefit - not the receiver's. So I'm not surprised so few of your buyers offer to pay out of their own pocket to provide you with a service.

While selling, whenever tracking is used, the cost comes out of my pocket - and rightfully so. There's no way known that when buying something, I will ever pay more to use tracking. If the seller wants the service, they can pay for it themselves.

[digital*ghost]

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@lezned-toycollector wrote:

Tracking is for the sender's benefit - not the receiver's.

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If that were true, no buyer would ever send a message that asks for a tracking number, in cases where none were provided. There would be no point in My Post accounts for buyers, and no options for them like redirection and holds. No way for them to contact the delivery service themselves and say "what's going on here?" etc, which is always faster than asking the seller to do it. 

Most buyers do think what you have outlined - "I don't need to pay for an upgrade to tracking".....until they want to do something that requires a tracking number, which usually doesn't occur until after they've defaulted to lowest price / postage costs. 

Others just assume tracking is default on all orders, no matter how much postage costs, and then are surprised when they get told it was sent untracked (I encountered this more on my website than I have on selling platforms, though - when the default option there was untracked, I'd get messages such as "what's the tracking number?" because the idea of buying from an online business and the order not having tracking had just never occurred to them, and my shipping was $3 lol, with it made clear it was an untracked service.

BTW, I had a lot of buyers upgrade to tracking when I offered untracked, too (wasn't very common here on ebay, though, more on my website and the other E site) - I assure you they weren't thinking about me when they did that, though, just like they don't think about me when they choose express. 

[bmanly3]

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@p9games wrote:

My listings offer tracked postage free for orders over $20, and express for over $200.  Express and Tracked are options at the buyers expense if they want.  About 3% to 5% of orders the buyer pays for Express, and a lower percentage upgrade to tracked (even on orders over $20, it seems nobody actually reads listings)

In terms of lost shipments my rate of lost, untracked items is lower than 1 in 500.  

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When I sent my orders untracked mine was similar, I only had around 2% convert from untracked to registered or express. There is nothing like the free ebay guarantee that you will receive your goods. I also found that when items were late, then that was when the buyer asked for the tracking number, only when needed.

I decided to sell everything with tracking now just to be sure but it can be the difference between getting a sale or not as the overall cost is higher. For similar products from several sellers a lot of buyers only care about what is the lowest price, some have even told me that through the messaging service.