For those that sell their items on Glowforge, can you help with the best shipping ideas?
Everything is mostly dimensional shipping, so even if the wood is light, it still cost a lot of $ to ship.
What has been the best and cheapest way to ship?
Thank you so much. I’m a brand new newbie.
Gloria
The first question is do you have your own boxes? This might be a larger savings than you think when it comes to shipping. Specifically, you need to find out the most common dimensions you are going to ship. If you go to the UPS store or some place similar they will charge you $10+ for the box alone. If you get custom boxes, not only will they be cheaper but they will probably keep your items safer from the perils of shipping destruction.
Second, if you are shipping things that are the entire sheet of proof grade you are looking at like $20-$25, or more, for just the dimensions. This price was based on using UPS’s flat rate shipping prices. I am sure you have probably figured this one out. So the first thing to get the price down is to produce smaller products. IE, don’t ship things that are the size of a full sheet of proofgrade unless you are will to charge a ton for shipping.
I know a lot of people who sell like the laser cut letters on Etsy stop at the 12x12 inch size and use the baltic birch plywood that is on Amazon. This is the reason the cap their letters sizes at 12 inches. It has more to do with the size of the material they are using.
You can look at the flat rate boxes from the USPS but they aren’t that much cheaper and I am not sure you would get the insurance coverage of shipping with UPS or Fedex.
Personally, I ship a few products that are entire sheets of proof grade material. I end up having to charge $50 for them because half the price is eaten up by shipping.
Most of the other items are much smaller and the shipping isn’t that bad on them. So if shipping is a problem, maybe specialize in smaller items.
You are so nice to get back with me. Some of my items are larger than the full sheet of wood, but I will take your suggestion and try to cut things down.
Can you help with another question? Do I have to use glow forge premium membership in order to keep my fonts and other functions? My trial expired yesterday that I got with my new glow forge, and now I have nothing. I can’t afford $50 a month ($600 yr) for that. So now we are trying things in Inkscape. I hope I didn’t spend all this money for a paperweight!
Gloria
You are so nice to get back with me. Some of my items are larger than the full sheet of wood, but I will take your suggestion and try to cut things down.
Can you help with another question? Do I have to use glow forge premium membership in order to keep my fonts and other functions? My trial expired yesterday that I got with my new glow forge, and now I have nothing. I can’t afford $50 a month ($600 yr) for that. So now we are trying things in Inkscape. I hope I didn’t spend all this money for a paperweight!
Gloria
PS… I buy my own boxes. But I do wreaths as well and a lot of them are 24”
I have Glowforge Premium, I got in on the $15 a month deal they had going. Do they still have it going?
Inkscape is what I use, almost exclusively, even though I am paying for the premium features. When using inkscape, you pretty much don’t have any limitations. In fact I would tell you that you have the ultimate in flexibility. There is a little bit of a learning curve with Inkscape but I think it is well worth it. Don’t forget that you need to Path | Object to Path on any fonts that you use. If you Don’t, the GlowForge app will be so nice and tell you that the fonts were removed. Are you having any difficulties right now?
I was looking at making some videos on how to use Inkscape in relations to Laser cutting and CNCing. I am not sure if I will get to them in the next week or two but that is the current plan.
May want to examine Search (magnifying glass by your picture upper right). There are a plethora of How To videos available.
Will allow you to avoid repeats if nothing else.
Smutty that would be great if you did videos. I just can’t afford right now any more monthly expenses for this Maxine. I also have a Cricut maker I use for other projects. My hubby has MS and Retinal Melanoma. So he now lost his job. Trying to figure this out so we can make some extra $. He does beautiful wood bowls too on the lathe that I will be selling.
Would you mind terribly buddying up with us to get us through this Dilemma ? Since we lost our trial software that came with buying machine, it took away all of our fonts, pictures that came with glow forge.
I appreciate the time spent with us already.
My suggestion for mailing is to use Goshippo.com or PirateShip.com to decrease the cost a bit. My experience is mostly sub 16 oz., but the few times I have sent 5 to 10 lb boxes, I purchased my labels through Shippo, printed and attached, then dropped them off at USPS for Priority Shipping.
Learning how to use Inkscape fonts is the way to go. You can buy more fonts and little pictures from websites like Creativefabrica.com and Creativemarket.com, and as far as I understand, all the pictures that Glowforge uses come from the Noun Project, where you can get a yearly license for $40. Granted, you have to learn how to use them in Inkscape instead of the Glowforge interface, but it is worth the savings when money is tight.
As you are looking to make items for sale I would strongly recommend you create the files for your items in a program like Inkscape. Inkscape, and other vector editors, can use any font installed on your computer*. Google Fonts is a collection of over a thousand open source fonts.
Every week Creative Market offers six things for free. Normally, two of these are fonts. This week three of them are fonts. CAUTION: before downloading to lase onto your goods for sale, check the license type. If the license type is Desktop this is allowed. All three fonts this week come with a Desktop license.
https://creativemarket.com/free-goods
There are other resources out there that offer open source fonts, or fonts that are pretty cheap. It won’t take long before you have a nice collection. IMO fonts of the same type all start to look alike after you have a few and then you’re just hoarding. Just because I’m a digital hoarder doesn’t make it not hoarding. 
*on Windows 10 you have to “install for all users” or you may not be able to access it in all programs.
I go DAILY to: https://www.creativefabrica.com/daily-gifts/ and download the free font (there are also usually 1 thing that is not a laser item (more of a printable) and a design. They are commercial use. Be aware, they can show you some really cool fonts and designs and suck you in on the sales (I have done my share). 
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