Don't Ignore 2021 USPS Rate Increases - Protect Your Bottom Line!

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USPS rates for 2021 go into effect on January 24th!

Even though the latest round of USPS rate hikes don't seem like a big deal, they add up and will impact your profit margins if you are offering "free" shipping or a flat rate price to make your listings more attractive to potential customers.

We all know shipping isn’t actually free and we need to ensure that we are not cheating ourselves out of the money we work so hard for. What about raising our own products’ prices for the new year while we’re at it??

Let's do some simple math: say you spent $3,000 in "free" postage in 2020 and you ship via Priority Mail, which is seeing a 3.5% increase on average. If you don't raise your prices, that's a loss of $105 over the course of a year. $105 that you could invest on a variety of other things to move your business forward!

What you can do to offset the USPS pricing increase:

  1. Review your Etsy shipping profiles and listings that qualify for "free" shipping and build in the price increase based on averages or the new flat rate priority prices. Everyone approaches shipping differently so do what works for you. Calculated shipping will take care of itself so no action needed there.

  2. Add a note in your Etsy Shop Announcement to let customers know that USPS prices have gone up. An informed customer is a happy customer!

I’ve created some handy price comparisons for the more popular USPS mail classes, so you can use these as a guide or head to USPS.com and download their comprehensive pricing spreadsheets for 2021 here.

Are you already on top of these pricing increases or have you never really considered it a big deal? Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

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