2009 Shipping Deadlines

Well the holiday rush has arrived. I have compiled the shipping deadlines by company for your convenience.

USPS:

International Mail: December 8th
International Express Mail: December 17th
First Class & Priority: December 21st
Express Mail: December 23rd

For a detailed shipping chart including Military address shipping deadlines go to: http://www.usps.com/holiday/shippingcalendar.htm

UPS:

Standard: December 15th
3 Day: December 20th
Expedited: December 21st
Express: December 23rd

UPS said people can ship items by air as late as Dec. 23 for delivery on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24
http://compass.ups.com/uploadedFiles/2009_UPS_PEAK_SEASON.pdf

Fedex:

Ground & Home Delivery: December 17th
Express Saver: December 21st
2 Day: December 22nd
Overnight: December 23rd

Dec. 17 is the last day to guarantee delivery before Christmas through FedEx Ground. Dec. 23 is the last day to ship by way of the company's Express service.

http://www.fedex.com/us/holiday/shipping/lastdaystoship.html#us

Using CSV Feeds

Last time I did the online sales thing I loaded each and every item I sold one by one. It was very time consuming and not very efficient. This time I have learned about using CSV feeds. I actually had no clue that my wholesale distributor provided a feed that had every item listed on it with all the information I needed to list it on my store. I am lucky enough to have a boyfriend who knows how to write script but I think with a little research, even a novice could learn how to convert these feeds into a useful tool for their website. With the use of script to transform the data provided by the wholesaler to the data required by my web host, I am able to upload my csv file and add 500+ products in less than 30 minutes.

Before it was taking me about 30 minutes to load one item!  More information can be found about CSV files at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values. More information can be found about scripts at: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/scripts.html. You can even use CSV files with eBay. They have a page with details of how to upload CSV data. This page can be found here: http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/import-csv.html.

Well this is my knowledge sharing for today. I know some of the more experienced sellers will already know what I am saying but if you are as inexperienced as I was, I hope this comes as a helping hand to you. Good luck, tis the season for sales.