"I recommend Designer and luxury items be sent by insured mail with a tracking number, which may cost a bit more than the postage shown in the listing.
Use Calculated Shipping.
The cost of Postage depends on many factors - buyer address, size/weight of box, insured or not, air or surface, etc.
Well, yeah. Irrelevant. Use Calculated Shipping."
Calculated shipping can be very problematic and risky for the seller if you're selling items with a wide range of value and weights/sizes. Buyers are inevitably going to choose what's cheapest, and don't understand or care about differences between shipping options, especially if they're in the U.S.
With all due respect to femmefan, Pierre, et al, sellers who concentrate on primarily one area of merchandise, especially when those items are relatively small and lightweight, have a far simpler task where shipping is concerned. I would not leave a U.S. buyer to decide what shipping to choose on a $200 garment that must go in a large box.
Simply put, because of the type of items I sell, I make the decisions on shipping in advance. All my listings are flat rate. This ties in with the comments by others about not giving too much information on shipping in listings - aside from asking international buyers or buyers with multiple purchases to request a total.
I have a suggestion for "tigergirl1" that may help with shipping anxieties, and lower the FVFs on shipping somewhat, and make customers happy: Like you, I sell garments that are expensive and rather large that really must go insured with tracking. For these I show a flat rate that is a few dollars below the true shipping cost. This of course varies with the price of the item and the weight/shipping size. For example, on a $200 item, I can afford to show a shipping cost of $5 or more lower than reality; on a $50 item it might be only $2.00 lower.
So, I show the rate for say, Tracked Packet as $15.00 when it's actually perhaps $20.00. I say nothing in the listing about discounted shipping (unless it's a really huge discount on a particular listing). When the item is purchased, I send a thank-you email to my buyer, telling him/her I'm going to upgrade the shipping at no charge to them. I may also tell them what the actual cost would have been. Then, when processing the online shipping label, I pay the difference for the upgrade. I often build this loss into my pricing, but on occasion I just rack it up to promotion and good business (oh yes, and I keep track of these discounts for tax purposes).
For me, with the wide range of sizes, shapes and values I sell, this has worked well, kept my DSRs for shipping up, and has made repeat customers. This strategy is a compromise between offering free shipping on everything then rolling the cost into my prices, or letting the customer pay full shipping and myself pay full FVFs on the shipping.
On the subject of KISPP (thank you Pierre:-x), although I agree that almost all of the text not dealing with the item description or the seller's personal situation should go, with some categories of items I think people need and want fuller descriptions, and the listings have to be exciting and attractive besides. This is especially true with clothing. Although some categories of items can be completely and sufficiently described in a few lines, many cannot. There is "completeness" and there is "attractiveness" - qualities that have to be reconciled in advertising (I worked in the marketing industry for years, so perhaps have a more personal take on this than others). A "KISPP" listing isn't necessarily the right touch if you're selling designer clothing for example.
The above isn't to say that I disagree with those who believe buyers no longer read descriptions...the challenge is to make the descriptions interesting enough that buyers may read at least the important parts. I work on the premise of packing the essentials and excitement into the first 2 paragraphs -- after that, I assume only truly interested buyers will read on.
One other suggestion to 'tigergirl1' (is it Kathy?): Can you afford to spend money on an auction management service? I use Auctiva (used to be free, now it's $2.95/mo.) and they have some really attractive templates. There are some free services - I think maybe Inkfrog still is (eBay's is rather poor in comparison, IMHO). These allow you to store "boilerplate" for "Shipping", "Terms of Sale", "About Us", and "Contact" that go into tidy little paragraphs at the end of each listing. You don't have to do anything once you've set them up.
I disagree with the opinion mentioned above that you shouldn't bother with testimonials. There is a place for these, but I agree that place is not in the listings. I can't recall whether you use eBay's "Store Pages". Using that tool (access it through "Manage Store") you can set up a page where you can highlight the best of customer testimonials -- buyers who are interested can look them up, others don't have to bother. You can set up other pages too, like "FAQ" for example, to handle those pesky repeated questions. Then all you need to say in the listing itself is "See "Store Pages"", and hope they will. By the way, like other store boxes, you can locate these where you want them, change the fonts, colours, etc. to grab more attention. I may be telling you things you already know, but since you mentioned problems with FAQs, I thought I'd add these notes here.
Oh yes, and one final note: if you haven't already done so, check out what your listings look like over the eBay mobile network - Yikes! it was an education for me, and forced me to change the whole concept and layout of my listings.
And yes, femmefan, I'm over 50 too, don't own a mobile phone, don't want one, don't care to use one, but no doubt there's much more to come in mobile/online shopping access.
