Selling Items Online? How To Ensure They Arrive Safely

Posted by Nick Niesen on November 1st, 2010

When the Internet first gained notoriety, who would have thought that someone in Tokyo could buy a chandelier from someone in Des Moines online?

Today, with the influx of popular auction sites like eBay, which has 48 million active users, people are buying and selling a variety of extraordinary items not found in your local shopping mall.

From cars to designer shoes to autographed memorabilia, you never know what you can purchase or sell on eBay until you take a look for yourself. In Arlington, Texas, a woman sold a 7-foot-tall, 60-pound plastic replica of Jar Jar Binks from "Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace." She acquired it from her brother-in-law, who won it in a grocery store contest. It was sold on eBay to a Star Wars fan in Yakima, Washington, to add to the man's huge toy collection.

But selling that one-of-a-kind item is easy compared to figuring out how you are going to get it shipped. To this end, a mutually beneficial alliance has been evolving between online auction users and Pak Mail Centers around the country.

As the popularity of buying and selling small, large, unique, awkward and precious items online grows, so does the need for professional packing and shipping services to help the seller get the goods to their destination as promised and in one piece.

When it was time to ship Jar Jar off to its new owner, for

instance, Pak Mail created a custom-built wooden shipping crate and considered it business as usual. In fact, Pak Mail has shipped such items as church pulpits, murphy beds, golf paraphernalia, birthday cakes, a manhole cover and even a dinosaur egg.

Pak Mail Centers offer an extended menu of services including specialty shipping, crating and custom packing as well as international shipping. They also provide estimated shipping costs for most items, which allows an online seller to know ahead of time how much to factor in for shipping before listing an item for auction.