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Originally Posted by Tom&JenC
Newbie here in Deluna. Whats the deal with Amazon here? Do they just deliver to your home address as per usual or does the mail station come into play. I should have asked at closing but I forgot about it.
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UPS, FedEx, and Amazon all deliver to your home, but sometimes UPS (and Amazon?) delivers to one of the large mailboxes at your postal station instead. If you get a message from UPS saying your package has been delivered, but it’s not on your porch, chances are it is in your postal station, and the key to the box is in your own mailbox. I haven’t been able to figure out how they decide where to leave packages. Sometimes a rather heavy box is left at the postal station, and sometimes a tiny bag is left at my porch. However, USPS boxes or oversized items in bags are left at the postal stations if possible. This is very nice. Where I lived before moving here, I had to drive to the post office to pick up an oversized package, and that was five miles away.
One thing about shipping. I don’t know how Amazon Prime can cover shipping costs for most things—they must have amazing deals with shippers. However, I sell used musical instruments and books sometimes on eBay, Amazon, and Reverb (for instruments), and I can tell you that if I weigh and measure the box and buy shipping from those companies, I save a LOT, and I assume other sellers do, too. For example, if I take a box with a guitar in it to a pack and ship store to the UPS Annex or something, it might cost me $150, but if I buy the shipping from one of the above companies, the best price may be more like $85. (FedEx is sometimes cheaper but nearly often much more.) I print out the shipping and postage label and drop off the box at any pack and ship—without having to stand in line.
Another interesting thing: If I buy a used book on Amazon for $5, I have to pay $3.99 shipping plus tax. If I sell a used book for $5, however, Amazon takes $4.11 of that and charges me two kinds of tax. The cardboard mailer costs me 75 cents, and tape maybe a quarter. If the buyer isn’t too far away and the book isn’t too heavy, my shipping for a book may be only $3.25, as I then have access to a Printed Matter rate that is not available to me at the Post Office and is cheaper than Media Mail. So that sale may make me as little as three cents or as much as 78 cents, judging from past sales. So I won’t sell a book for under $5, and I only sell them to get rid of them, not to make money. If a book won’t sell for $5, I give it away to the local library for a sale.