The following is part of an email I sent to someone who was asking for advice on shipping Apple II items. You may need to adapt some of it to work with what you are shipping if you're looking at this page for guidelines on how to sell and ship on an occasional basis, this is probably something good to take a look at... If you sell a lot and are just not certain how to pack something.. then the packing section is probably all you'll really care about. oh... if you're shipping a computer with a built in monitor, you should probably ship it as if it were a monitor. You may want to follow the link at the end of this as well. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ACCEPTING PAYMENTS I want to express one thing to you... make sure you have collected at least the "estimate" ammount of how much it will cost to box up and ship this stuff before you send it off... do not let people pay after they receive it... you WILL get ripped off if you ship first and expect to get paid on arrival.... If the interested party pays by snail mail, tell them to go to their local check cashing shop or convenience store, postal office, or any other place affiliated with western union and buy a money order, it works just like a check, but it's backed by a big financial institution instead of an indevidual so unless the money order company goes belly up, it WONT BOUNCE.. and it should only cost 75 cents to a dollar over the amount they put on it..... do not accept personal checks.... They can bounce as many as three weeks after you've deposited them and shipped the items... then you're out the cost of shipping and the bounced check fee and whatever you were hoping to make off the sale... remind them that while their bank's casheirs checks may cost as much as $7, money orders as mentioned above, are much cheaper and work pretty much the same way. Do not accept any electronic payment other than PayPal(just a note, this is probably a little extreme, there are other options online that are probably just fine... but I have no experience with them so it's up to you to do the research to make sure it's not a bad idea to use)... This is an easy way to keep from getting screwed.... In fact, unless you are making money on this, I'd suggest insisting on snail mail payments only...though you can accept non-credit card funded payments without getting a buisness account... limit is something $500 a month...no fees if it's not a buisness account... though you should know there is risk involved when you consider that paypal is not a bank and is not FDIC insured.... just something to think about before going and putting a bank account number into paypal so you can accept payments. SHIPPING OF FLOPPY DRIVES I have never seen a transit card for an apple II drive...but if you have any commodore drives to ship... you should make sure they have transit cards in them... Instructions on making a transit card can be found here: You can cut that out of a cereal box or other similar non-corrugated cardboard box. I have posed a question on comp.sys.apple2 to find out if transit cards should be used in Apple II drives, there will likely be an answere in a few hours... this topic can be found at the following url: PACKING/SHIPPING OF PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING BUT MONITORS Shipping... well here's a little advice I'll give you.... on shipping.... I once had a very nicely written article I found on usenet on this subject... but I can not find it.. so I will try my best to put this out.... Anything really big NEEDS to be double boxed or at least packed very well... an Apple IIgs you can get away with padding it up a bit... if you put multiple things in one box, it does not hurt to have smaller boxes within bigger boxes, I did this once when I shipped a complete IIgs setup with floppies, and keyboard, mouse, extra cards, and such..... shipping apple IIs with cards installed isn't probably a good idea since they are not screwed down ... you can put them in small flat boxes and then put them in on top of the computer.... AN EXCEPTION: Accelerator cards, in particular IIgs ones.... they use cables which plug into the socket on the board where the processor would go......... this socket is cheap and can only withstand so many inertions/removals.... if you can not disconnect the card from this cable without disconnecting the cable from the processor socket, then leave it be! Pretty much everything should be bubble wrapped then... you put a layer of peanuts in.... then put the items into the box.... make sure the items are not touching the edge of the box... and fill in the empty space with peanuts... throw in a sheet of paper with the ship to address, ship from address, and your phone number on it into the box(so that if the label gets defaced the lost package department can relabel it as soon as they rip into it to see if they can find out where it's going).. then tape shut.... Packing peanuts: you want to protect the item from the outside forces... but realize that with most things too many packing peanuts can be just as bad.... it shouldn't be able to shift around... but if the packing peanuts are too compressed they will only send the full force of the outside blow into the item inside. PACKING/SHIPPING OF MONITORS Monitors should NOT be packaged with ANYTHING else(they like to bop about in the package breaking everything else). Stands should be removed from monitors, and put in a smaller box within the larger box(they WILL break otherwise).. packing a montior: 1) tape a sheet of card board over the monitor glass(prevents scratching of screen) 2) wrap the monitor in big bubble(not small bubble) wrap, 3)shove the monitor into a box that tears out a little because the box isn't really quite big enough... tape the box shut as best as possible. 4) take a bigger box with at least 4 inches larger sides from the bigger box(leaving for a padding space of 2 inches on each side) 5) layer the big box with packing peanuts at the bottom... you will want to force as much packing peanuts in as possible.(it's a little different rule from other things, but it's the right way) 6) put the smaller box into the bigger box, shove packing peanuts in around the sides... cover t he iner box with peanouts... 7) you should have to sqeeze the bigger box shut... put three strips of tape down the opening... then run three strips of tape all the way around the box the other direction(accross the openings) If the box is dropped(and it probably will, they really man handle stuff no mater who you ship through) the corner will dent and the packing peants will move a little... but the monitor should survive.... Who to ship through: Tiny packages go through USPS... most of your packages should not go through USPS. You will want to use either UPS, FedEx, or DHL (and actually, DHL tends to work out cheaper for me on most ground shipments).... USPS hates large packages... they gouge the price and quite frankley, people who hate handling large packages are probably not the people you should be paying to move your computers. If you need help on packing things up, most places don't charge more than a couple bucks over the cost of materails to pack things for you.(and it also makes it so you don't have to buy a mile of bubble wrap when you don't need it all) Just make sure they do it in front of you. There's no telling what stupid bad job they could do if they take it into the "packing room" out of your sight.(I have two shipping centers in my area, one which is inconvenient for my work hours and one which is open way early and way late. I go to the inconvenient one because their packing room is their sales floor, the convenient one's packing room is the back room behind the counter, where you can't go) Ooh... found the old shipping tips article on google groups just now, just click this really long url: I really hope this helps. Matthew S. Carpenter ============================================= End message.. If you'd really like to email me for some odd reason or another.... well, my account is rockinkat and my domain of choice is thecowsaysmoo.org figure out my address from that.