I've been up all night adjusting shipping. My PayPal checkout isn't very flexible when it comes to this. It has a limited amount of weight tiers to work with.

It seems my international customers will be hit hardest. A typical single light kit order (EX: light kit, acrylic design set, power splitter) weighing 1lb or less cost me $16.16 (charged $17.95) to ship....now it costs me $22.50 (I will be charging $23.50). So they are charging $6.34 more on this >1lb first class international package.

I hate to charge much over the actual shipping cost, but what I have always done in the past is charge the actual shipping amount, but then I do the shipping directly with the post office on-line. For doing this online, I always got a shipping discount from them. I kept the discount amount to cover shipping suppliers. So what the customer was paying was exactly what the package would have cost to ship if I took the package into the post office and had them process it.

Now, the post office is not only raising their rates, but they are cutting out the discount for doing the shipping paperwork on-line. As I have my shipping set up now, I have small US orders marked up $.50 and bigger orders (and international small orders) up $1. Anything over a 2 kit order I am then setup to take a loss on the shipping in most cases.

I will be keeping an eye on things and adjusting accordingly. As always.....if my website overcharges on the shipping I will refund the overage back to the buyer's PayPal account (if it's $1 or more).

UPDATE: I did just notice something strange on the international shipping now, it's how they have the weights sectioned off before rate increases. You can ship 2lbs for the same price as something that weighs 9oz. That seems like a strangely large weight tier. I can ship 2 light kits internationally for the same price as 1....and shipping 2 is actually about the same price as shipping 2 was before the increase.