Ecommerce packages got you down?

 The rise and fall of our economy have put our whole country in a new shopping trend.  This year has been the year of eCommerce.  The statistics are blowing away people and we are now seeing the byproducts of this being done. I am completely shocked by how much online shopping I have done this year and it really was not my plan at all.  The year has changed the entire way my life works.  I know work from home and pretty much been stuck in my home unless an emergency is taking place.  Never in my life did I think that my own state for putting me on house arrest for committing no crime, but here we are and what it has caused no one could have foreseen.  When I go to my front door each day and pick up my Amazon package it saddens me.  Because I know that I am going to pick it up, cut it open and toss the box in my garage.  It really is a fact of life that now my garage is a box pit and it has taken me a few months to learn how to get rid of all those boxes.  I want to do it the most ethically responsible way and that took some time to figure out.  See my trash company only allows us to have one recycle can each week.  This is a problem and not a fun one.

No one likes to work at getting rid of their trash and I am certianly one of those people.  I first just started to throw full cardboard boxes into my recycle trash can and I could fit anywhere from three to four.  This would have been perfect on a normal week, but since the pandemic, I am getting 10 or more boxes a day.  That means that I am constantly running a surplus of packages that are stacking up in my garage.  So after a week, I knew this was not going to work.  I started to work on different ways to figure the problem out but time won and I simply gave up.  Alas, my family could no longer take not having a useable garage and then I had to find a way to get rid of it all and not just put them in a trash bag to go to a landfill. 

What is really sad is that all of those cardboard boxes did not need to go to a land fill I wanted them to go and be recycled because everyone is going through the same thing and I didn't want to contribute to the harmful ways of huritng out the earth.  I want to promote sustainability. I think this was the best thing to do and it was worth the time.  So I started to use my hands to break down the packages and fit them in the trash can. 

It had to stop because I was only able to do this for a few boxes because it gave me paper cuts and blisters.  It also left me with uneven tears in the packages and they didn't fit in the can very efficiently.  So the next obvious step was to go out and get some scissors.  This was a great plan and it worked really well for a long while. So get to snipping!

Did you just get into eCommerce?

I know that 2021 is the changing time in our country.  We are now all buying from home and online for just about everything.  It is pretty cool, but if you are jumping into this industry it can be a bit hard. Now, I am so happy for you and the American Economy in general because we all win when people compete and build up a great economy.  This is a cool thing, but many people are just starting out and don't know the simple basics of selling online.  That is just fine and I want to help you understand the basics so you don't end up losing money learning the hard way.  I have lost money-making sales online and I don't others to learn from a mistake that could be avoided.  I like to learn from other people's mistakes, so let's go over some of mine so that you don't have to do it!

Now I want to go back to my first sale.  I sold my first thing online back in college.  Back then was my first time selling so I made accounts on Amazon and eBay.  This was really fun and a little complicated back then because it was all run on email.  We didn't have smartphones so you had to manually check on a computer each day.  Well back then you only hopped on a computer once or twice a week normally.  So it meant a lot of extra work to even see if someone purchased your item.  But I got lucky and within a few days of checking my book sold for almost as much as I paid for it.  I was too excited to really think about a lot of different things that would end up biting me in the butt.

Now, I got the buyer's address I decided I needed to get a nice package to send it in.  I went to my local big box store and found the aisle of cardboard boxes and decided to pick a nice one out.  I found that there were a lot of cardboard boxes to chose from and in fact I decided a bag was going to be better. It had bubble wrap in it already and I went with that one.  I got the bag but didn't trust the seal on it.  The bags were indeed not as sturdy bags then and I needed to buy the tape.  So I went to the tape aisle and got a roll of packing tape as well.  To be honest, once I checked out I realized I had just spent 10 dollars on supplies for the book to be shipped.  Then I packed it all up and went to the post office.  It was a cost of fifteen bucks or so to ship the book.

In the end, I only had about five bucks left in profit.  I was a bit sad. But then the money was transferred to me from the seller and eBay took ten percent and PayPal took another three percent.  With my time, gas, and energy put into this I lost money.  It all made me a bit sad at first.  I then realized I set my prices way too low and that I didn't take into account the money that the platform would take from me. Yep, I lost money. But I learned a whole lot!