The Scoop on PC Postage

August 15, 2006 by admin · Comments 

PC based postage services have been around for some time, allowing consumers to purchase and print their own postage without leaving the office. While adding convenience, postage costs are identical to what you would find at the post office. Subscribers to PC Postage services pay monthly service fees which are generally less expensive than leasing or buying a postage meter. For a small business, it could equal substantial savings.

A PC postage “stamp”

Stamps.com and their competitor Endicia.com are the two PC Postage services currently available. After using both services extensively, I’ve found Endicia offers a far better and more affordable service over Stamps.com, although neither is perfect.

Click read more to see the full review.

Through my various activities I’m always sending out postcards and letters to multiple recipients. Usually most of these mailings lack a corps of volunteers to label and stamp the cards before they go out the door. PC Postage saves me all of that aggravation, as I’m able to simply print out the label and stamp directly on the card or envelope. It also saves a trip to the post office to buy stamps.

Stamps.com
Stamps.com, at $15.99 a month, has the nicest looking software package, but beneath its shiny exterior is a troubling and difficult user experience.

My major gripe with stamps.com is its inability to reprint a single piece of a multiple piece mailing. I was printing a run of approximately 100 postcards and experienced a printer jam about halfway through. I lost two cards out of the 100, and wanted to reprint the postage and label for those two cards only. Sounds simple enough, right?

Stamps.com requires the user to reprint the entire run. If you’re using more expensive envelopes, it immediately becomes a trade off of postage vs. materials. Your choices are to reprint the entire run, or just regenerate the two cards or envelopes you need to complete the mailing. You can apply for a postage refund, but that usually takes 4 to 6 weeks to return.

Importing multiple addresses for a mailing proved equally difficult. Stamps.com tries to be helpful in splitting up first and last names (even when those fields are delineated) which fouls up mailings going to more than one person on a single piece of mail. For example, Jon and Mary Smith becomes Jon Smith. Even mapping the joined names to Stamps.com’s fullname field does the same stupid thing. The solution is to join the fields and map them to the “business name” field for the import. Not a big deal, but it still requires extra work that isn’t necessary.

Stamps.com’s customer service line is frequently busy, and if you’re lucky enough to get through you most likely will be on hold for close to an hour before speaking with an agent. Email support is relatively prompt, but the responses are typically canned answers that don’t directly address the question. And if all of that isn’t bad enough, you can’t cancel your trial or regular membership without first calling the customer service number. It cannot be done online.

Stamps.com does do some things right, specifically its ease in printing to postcards and envelopes of varying sizes. Set up is quick and painless and in my experience did not require configuring the printer drivers to make it work. Unfortunately this is not enough to keep me as a customer.

Endicia.com
I came across Endicia after my frustration with Stamps.com’s inability to reprint my faulty postage. Unlike Stamps.com, Endicia< considers every piece of a batch process individually, meaning it’s relatively easy to go back after a print job and reprint misprints without having to redo the entire run. That alone was worth it for me.

Endicia’s monthly price is also very competitive. The rate is $9.99 a month for the basic plan, which does everything I need it to do. They also offer a ‘premium’ plan for $15.95 that offers some more bells and whistles (like the ability to design business reply mail, statistics, and other features). For my 100+ piece postcard mailings, the basic plan works fine.

Their software also allows for your own graphics and images to be placed on the postage side of the card or envelope, something Stamps.com cannot do through their software. Endicia’s interface, while not extravagant, is easy to use and manipulate.

Although Endicia has the advantage on reprints and price, their software is a bit trickier than Stamps.com when it comes to defining postcard and envelope sizes. Although a few basic sizes are included with the plan, I did have trouble configuring the software to output postcards on my printer. I had to go into the printer driver settings and define a custom paper size for a pre-printed postcard I was sending out.

Conclusion
Internet postage is far from perfect and has its share of trade-offs that still make it easier to drive to the post office and buy a book of stamps. For small businesses and organizations looking to streamline their postage without the expense of a meter, a PC based solution is a viable and more affordable alternative.

Of the two vendors I sampled, my money’s on Endicia as the more flexible product out there right now. Stamps.com looks nice, but wasted more of my time than it saved. I don’t even suggest taking advantage of their free trial since it’s nearly impossible to talk to a customer service agent to cancel.

I’m hoping that in the future these services will assist with bulk mailing, which will make them true money saving investments. For now their only real cost savings are the time it takes to stick labels and stamps on envelopes.

Filed under: Blog, Tech Reviews
Tagged: