# Shipping a snowboard sucks



## eelpout (Mar 1, 2009)

I obviously haven't shipped a board in a while as it's easily $50-65 now to do so (last time I did this I think it was around $30). The culprit? Dimensional weight calculations. I have a UPS account with a discount and it's still ridiculous. 

So, how do _retailers (and manufacturers too)_ get around this?


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## lab49232 (Sep 13, 2011)

eelpout said:


> I obviously haven't shipped a board in a while as it's easily $50-65 now to do so (last time I did this I think it was around $30). The culprit? Dimensional weight calculations. I have a UPS account with a discount and it's still ridiculous.
> 
> So, how do _retailers_ get around this?


Indeed! Retailers have a couple tricks, it all depends on how good your negotiating is and how you service your shipping.

1: Negotiating
You hope your volume is big enough to use some muscle and lower rates. If you're really good you may even get them to drop the relatively new dimensional shipping fees. Either way in this method shipping has gotten exponentially more expensive to ship from your company
2: Amazon FBA
You can ship pallets of boards to Amazon through FBA and they pay for shipping to the customer. Amazon has you ship them the items through their shipping deals so you get Amazon's shipping prices when mailing them the inventory. It would disgust you to see how cheap it gets. However Amazon fees are incredibly expensive. Depending on volume and your rates you get from your own accounts it can still be cheaper to eat the Amazon fees, and pay to mail them the item rather than doing it yourself
3: 3PL
There's lots of logistics companies that do all of the shipping for you. These companies are obviously doing business with multiple companies meaning their volume is far larger giving them better negotiating with shipping companies as well as more efficient shipping to keep costs down


But in general yes shipping has gotten insane over the past few years. It's why you see oversized shipping costs applied to some items more frequently now. Pay some respect to the companies giving you free shipping but still having the same price, They're eating a lot of extra costs just to try and keep their customer base and it's not easy on the businesses.


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## smellysell (Oct 29, 2018)

Burrito and click N ship has never been over $35 for me. 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk


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## BoarderHack89 (Mar 1, 2020)

USPS has always been the cheapest for me, about $35


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## eelpout (Mar 1, 2009)

smellysell said:


> Burrito and click N ship has never been over $35 for me.


heh, never knew that method had a name, but that's what I ended up doing for one shipment, using a box Evo.com sent me.

Burrito-Wrap: How to Pack & Ship a Snowboard

With better boxing (2 boards), ended up using UPS and kept it around $50 w/discount (FedEx Ground was crazy high for the same box).


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## smellysell (Oct 29, 2018)

eelpout said:


> heh, never knew that method had a name, but that's what I ended up doing for one shipment, using a box Evo.com sent me.
> 
> Burrito-Wrap: How to Pack & Ship a Snowboard
> 
> With better boxing (2 boards), ended up using UPS and kept it around $50 w/discount (FedEx Ground was crazy high for the same box).


Like BoarderHack said, USPS is the cheapest.


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## f00bar (Mar 6, 2014)

It's really too bad because I have a ton of youth stuff, boards, boots, bindings, that are in amazing condition I'd love to sell for really good prices, but the shipping in some cases doubles the cost.


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