Online Postage Takes Business To A New Frontier
The Advantages of Using Online Postage
Americans live in a consumer-based economy, and an enormous amount of what they consume is either delivered via the US Postal Service. If the actual items themselves are not shipped via the USPS, the orders, invoices, and bills for those items are. Then there are the car and mortgage payments, and bills for household services like home heating and cooling, or trash pickup.
Although it is now possible to pay many utility and credit card bills online, millions of people still rely on the United States Postal Service to get their payments to their lenders on time. There are also millions of businesses who advertise via direct mailings to their customers. Some experts estimate that over six hundred million pieces of mail are transported by the US Mail on an average day, and more during the holiday season.
With that sort of volume, and demand for US postage, it’s not surprising that more people are deciding to take advantage of the online postage sites which allow them to print postage for themselves with the help of their home computers. The ability to buy stamps online has saved thousands of businesses an enormous amount of time, and depending on the volume of their mailings, can also save them a considerable amount of money.
Individuals and businesses who take advantage of online postage can choose to print postage either in the form of shipping labels or as actual postage stamps. They can even choose to create personalized photo stamps with their own photgraphs, artwork, or business logos! They simply establish online postage accounts with the USPS or with any of the online vendors who have been licensed by the USPS as postage vendors.
The idea of allowing businesses and individuals print their own US postage is certainly nothing new: for decades anyone who wanted to could rent a US Postage Meter. But the rental fees for those meters made them practical only for those people and businesses with postage needs which exceeded the fees. They were not a realistic solution for the average person, and they also required return trips to the local Post Office for reloading.
The person renting the machine has to estimate how much postage should be put on it for a particular period, and when that amount has been exhausted, will have to purchase more. An incorrect estimate can mean having to interrupt business in the middle of an important mailing for reloading, and hoping that the local Post Office is open when the meter runs out of postage.
The advantages of being able to buy postage stamps and postage labels online are many. Besides eliminating those annoying trips to the Post Office to get the postage, the online postage vending sites actually offer carrier pickup services for packages and bulk mailings. Online postage sites will spare you from having to run your business according the Post Office’s hours, or use up your expensive gas carting your bulk mailing and parcels to your local Post Office branch.
The enormous popularity of selling on Internet auctions like eBay and Bidz.com has given more individuals than ever before a need to have convenient and inexpensive postage available, and auction sellers are some of the most enthusiastic users of online postage. EBay, in fact, has its own online postage printing feature and allows sellers to buy postage stamps with the funds in their PayPal accounts.
All the online postage vendors allow you to print postage labels which hide the actual amount of the postage in the labels’ indicia, so that you won’t have to deal with customer complaints saying that you overcharged for postage. And if you have several items to ship to the same buyer, you can print multiple labels from your standard printer with that buyer’s address without having to re-enter them into your computer.
You’ll be freed at last from those wasted minutes standing in line at the Post Office to send your mailings (and at the holidays it can run to wasted hours!) because your online postage service will let you schedule a carrier pickup. Even better, you can request that your parcels be delivered on specific days, perfect for those special occasions!
The different online postage vendors have different systems; some of them require you to pay monthly subscriptions depending on your postage requirements. EBay charges no fees for its sellers to print USPS shipping labels as needed to ship the products they have sold on the site. The other sites on which you can print postage are Click-n-Ship, Stamps.com, Endicia, and Pitney-Bowe’s Shipstream Manager, which sells online postage for parcels only.
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