Anybody ship wheels? Cost Estimate?
 

Hey all, any idea the best shipping option for a set of 4S wheels / tires? I'm shipping from TN to CA. UPS is coming up around $80 a wheel. Yikes. Maybe its expensive b/c I'm shipping across the country.

That does not sound unreasonable. Does the $80 per wheel include insurance?
Last shipment I did was $101/wheel with tires mounted, TX to VA with insurance at $1,000 per box. UPS Ground.

Wheels/Tires Ca. To NC $50 per wheel FedEx. Cardboard both sides.

look on ebay for shipping cost estimates ... lots of wheels available there

box wheels, dont ship them bare. try to get 2 in one box. Uhaul has good boxes, or tire and wheel shop throws out dozens per week so go get trash. For the size, weight doesnt matter so 2 will go same as price for 1. And shipping to ca or west coast is most expensive of any rate, so figure you have to pay unreasonable rates

I shipped a full set (4) of tires + wheels via FedEx back in February for $147 total. So about $37 / tire + wheel. I don't recall to where, anymore, and yes, distance does matter for these. I think I insured them, but I was shipping Panamera S wheels, so the value per wheel was only around $150.

I didn't mark them as "tires," just as a "package" of the gross dimensions of the tire. I put cardboard covers on both sides and then thoroughly wrapped it in stretch wrap designed for shipping. FedEx didn't object, and they arrived just fine. This isn't too different from the way the Tire Rack ships tires. Tires are actually pretty resilient, it's the wheels that can get scratched, which is why it's a good idea to put carboard over those.

Actually, no they don't. When first preparing for this, I hit a couple of tire shops asking after boxes. They said "boxes? What boxes? We get our tires wrapped up in plastic, not in boxes." Which is, in fact, how I've received tires every time I've ordered them online.

The only time I've gotten boxes was when I ordered bare wheels. A wheel shop might have boxes for bare wheels, but I was looking to ship a tire + wheel set, not bare wheels.

Perhaps try ShipNerd. They advertise and sponsor the Parts Marketplace forum here.

Shipnerd is the only way to go. I speak from experience.

Wrap faces and backs in cardboard with shrink wrap and UPS them for about $40/ea.
Or CL local for whatever you get...you own a Porsche, buck up.

I shipped 4 Tires/wheels covered with cardboard front and back and then plastic wrap covering everything in September by FedEx for $330. Springfield Il to West Linn OR including insurance.

I just checked my records. I shipped 4 wheels in proper heavy-duty boxes from Austin TX to Carlsbad CA for a total of $141.44 back in April. I do get some discount for having an account with them through PayPal but it is just a personal-use account so the discounts are good but not dramatic. They were HRE monoblocks so they were a few pounds lighter than OEM wheels.

I did find that it was actually cheaper not to bundle them into two bigger strapped-together sets of two but to ship them as 4 separate boxes, at least in this case with UPS. I ran the pricing both ways. The UPS ground rate was the best I could find short of pallet-shipping with freight company, which just seemed like too much trouble for little additional savings.

Amtrack is cheap too, have sent a half cage no problem from Seattle to LA for ~$100

Shipped wheels with tires from Philly to Colorado when I sold my 4S. A little over $300.