Whenever you are buying or selling online, for example on eBay, and you are trying to determine if a shipping price is fair, keep in mind there is more to shipping than just the cost of postage.

For example, if you are shipping a hard drive that weighs 3 pounds, you still have to:

• pack it in a box
• secure it with popcorn/bubble wrap
• seal the box
• take it to the shipping office
• (possibly) wait in line

All this takes time… and as we know, time is money. Granted some of these steps can be streamlined if you ship multiple packages at once or have doorstep pickup, but for the most part there is still cost involved.

So keep all this in mind when you determining (or paying) shipping.

If you do a lot of buy and selling online, you may or may not have a some sort of system in place to track all your orders. If not, a web site you should check out is TrackMyShipments. You can read about how the service works on their site. They currently support the 4 major carriers: UPS, Fedex, DHL and USPS.

A really cool function of the service is you can simply forward your shipment confirmation emails to an address they have set up and the email is automatically parsed for your account name, carrier and shipment number. This is a great time saver over the alternate way of manually entering the numbers (which you can do as well).

TrackMyShipments offers a free account which allows you to track up to 10 packages at one time, however if you want to track more you will need to sign up for their ‘Pro’ service which is currently $20 per year.