Flying Merkel

Selling a nice bike a Ebay. Had a lot of views and watchers, but no buyers. Had it listed for local pick up only. How do any of you-all ship bikes and how much is average?

kc0yef 

Only Use
https://www.bikeflights.com/

Your education is complete
Use no one else

Rocket-Sauce 

It depends on how far you are shipping. I just shipped my bike across country via shipbikes.com
using an aircaddy box I bought used ($30). It came to $129 to ship my bike from Boston to Seattle via Fedex ground. But the trick is that you have to pre-pay on the shipbikes website and use their pre-paid label. Otherwise, my bike would have cost $300 to ship via Fedex ground using the aircaddy box. Had I used a standard bike box, the rate would have been $80.

kc0yef 

Oh and Amtrack and that have boxes around $100 in US

wrk101

Local pickup only on ebay = total, complete waste of time for sellers. The reason to use ebay is to get a large potential pool of buyers. Local pickup eliminates this market, and is really the same as C/L (actually worse), but with lots of fees.

Now local pickup only on eBay as a buyer? It can be a deal. No competition from other buyers (are locals in Costa Mesa, CA really looking at eBay to find a local bike, or are they just checking C/L?) I picked up a nice Univega local pickup only, in Atlanta, for $15. Resold locally for $200.......

And as a possible buyer, lots of risk in buying from someone who has no feedback on packing and shipping a bike. And most buyers don't want to pay extra for packing (heck, most don't want to pay regular postage either!!). I've had complaints from buyers over the years on high shipping, when the actual postage on the shipping label was HIGHER than what I charged. I call it the Amazon factor. Buyers more and more expect free shipping. I like to ask people like that, "Do you think the item actually ships for free? Do you think the post office takes it, no charge, and mails it?" There really is no such thing as "free shipping." Its buried in the price of the item (90% of my sales on ebay go with "free shipping", I just adjust the price upward).

Not all buyers are savvy to checking sellers feedback on similar sales, so sometimes you can do OK. But as a minimum, you lose some potential bidders.


There are several comprehensive discussions on packing and shipping bikes. Miamijim has a nice tutorial on the subject.

miamijim

~$85 coast to coast for a 35lb box that's 130" or less length plus girth. A good bicycle store with charge $50-75 to box it up.

DIY packaging: $85-ish door to door
Bike store packaging: $130-160 door to door

Of course you'll want to add appropriate insurance.

Bikeflights and shipbikes are just brokers. You still need to get the thing boxed and dropped off. Once it's boxed a broker is no different than you walking into FedEx and dropping it off yourself.

miamijim

+1. I factor $85 into all my 'Buy Now' bicycle prices unless it's an exceptionally expensive bike and then I factor in as much as $125 to cover the special Madone box and extra insurance.

Packaging tutorial: https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-vi...ike-101-a.html

I working on a new way to package framesets, I found myself needing to ship a frameset while out of town and got creative with a flat screen TV box from Home Depot. I didn't even need to block the dropouts!!

Velognome 

+1 Most shops will give you Bike Boxes if you ask or go "dumpster diving" if the shop is closed.

eschlwc

i'll be using greyhound when i ship a bike from my folks house to my home halfway across the continent. it should be less than $50, but it can take a week or two for delivery.

i've only done it once, and it was $45. they said it might take up to three weeks (iirc), but it took less than a week. unfortunately, they wrote my phone number down incorrectly, so i wasn't notified. it sat in their storage a week more before i called.

so, verify your info.