E-Stamp redux
Oct. 4th, 2000 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpThere are days when I begin to feel that my apparent primary mission in life is to walk around with my wallet open wide to the world, casting greenbacks to the wind with little other purpose than to enrich perfect strangers and to steer myself to the poorhouse.
I just got off the phone a little while ago with E-Stamp customer support. The company sells a gizmo and software that lets you literally print valid U.S. postage on your printer (you've probably seen their banner ads all over the place). I allowed myself to invest about $50 for the hardware and software, because I thought it would be useful for my wife's real estate mailings and my occasional eBay packages, and it looked cheaper than investing in a traditional postage meter. Looking to get the best deal on their "convenience fee" (the amount you pay over the postage you buy), we opted to buy the maximum amount of postage, $500, which incurred a convenience fee of about $25, or about 5% overall.
The concept of printing your own postage is pretty slick, actually. If you're looking for a gimmick that screams "I am technologically up-to-date," this is it. The stamps come out looking like a "hash" that is laser-readable and apparently contains the date the mail was sent, confirms the value of the postage that was printed, and probably contains information related to the sender and/or recipient (I would imagine Zip code info, at least). For sure, I can say that every "stamp" requires a valid address, and addresses are validated using a CD-ROM database that's updated every six months. Periodically, the E-Stamp software uploads a report to the home office that shows how much postage has been used, and possibly uploads information about recipients as well. There is certainly opportunity to do so. In any event, this was a privacy risk I was willing to take.
Using the system was not always easy. Early on, some attempts to print postage gave me a nicely printed address, but no stamp, which basically meant the value of the postage was completely lost. A few other early tries misprinted, and I'm confident that the promised refund will be made once I make proper application. Other difficulties included a pain-in-the-neck interface with the Outlook address book and apparently limited types of postage that could be printed (Priority Mail, si; book rate, no). To be frank, I wasn't too fazed about the Outlook interface since I won't run Outlook except when forced to, but this meant having to enter each address by hand, which is in itself no big deal, except it makes the whole deal utterly unsuitable for large mailings. To be fair, E-Stamp never claimed it was suitable for large mailings.
The point of this post, though, is not to complain about what amount to Early Adopter issues. I have a relatively high tolerance for software "funnies" and design compromises. Heck, I've written software in my day. What utterly bugs me is the following:
A few months ago, we moved from one Zip code to a neighboring one. According to the terms of the USPS license, which we had to get to be able to use the E-Stamp hardware "vault," we had to get a new "vault" and return the old one we'd been using and get a refund of the postage stored "inside." We went along with the program, having printed out about $80 of postage by the time we sent the unit back for replacement.
We got the refund check today, and the refund apparently covers only the unused postage. The E-Stamp folks did not pro-rate the "convenience fee" at all. A call to customer service confirmed this. "The convenience fee is not refundable," said the service representative, a point echoed by his supervisor, who tried to convince me that this was fair. My position is that it would have been fair to charge me a convenience fee as if I'd bought only the $80 of postage I'd printed (the percentage would have been higher; something like 10%), and refund the rest. As far as I'm concerned, though, right now I feel as if I've been charged $25 for the privilege of printing $80 of postage (a "convenience fee" of about 30%).
Given that I am feeling a bit taken-advantage-of, I'm going to have to think really hard about whether I'm going to drop any more money in these folks' pockets. My advice to anyone contemplating getting into "printing their own postage" is caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.
Then again maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion.
Cheers...
.
I just got off the phone a little while ago with E-Stamp customer support. The company sells a gizmo and software that lets you literally print valid U.S. postage on your printer (you've probably seen their banner ads all over the place). I allowed myself to invest about $50 for the hardware and software, because I thought it would be useful for my wife's real estate mailings and my occasional eBay packages, and it looked cheaper than investing in a traditional postage meter. Looking to get the best deal on their "convenience fee" (the amount you pay over the postage you buy), we opted to buy the maximum amount of postage, $500, which incurred a convenience fee of about $25, or about 5% overall.
The concept of printing your own postage is pretty slick, actually. If you're looking for a gimmick that screams "I am technologically up-to-date," this is it. The stamps come out looking like a "hash" that is laser-readable and apparently contains the date the mail was sent, confirms the value of the postage that was printed, and probably contains information related to the sender and/or recipient (I would imagine Zip code info, at least). For sure, I can say that every "stamp" requires a valid address, and addresses are validated using a CD-ROM database that's updated every six months. Periodically, the E-Stamp software uploads a report to the home office that shows how much postage has been used, and possibly uploads information about recipients as well. There is certainly opportunity to do so. In any event, this was a privacy risk I was willing to take.
Using the system was not always easy. Early on, some attempts to print postage gave me a nicely printed address, but no stamp, which basically meant the value of the postage was completely lost. A few other early tries misprinted, and I'm confident that the promised refund will be made once I make proper application. Other difficulties included a pain-in-the-neck interface with the Outlook address book and apparently limited types of postage that could be printed (Priority Mail, si; book rate, no). To be frank, I wasn't too fazed about the Outlook interface since I won't run Outlook except when forced to, but this meant having to enter each address by hand, which is in itself no big deal, except it makes the whole deal utterly unsuitable for large mailings. To be fair, E-Stamp never claimed it was suitable for large mailings.
The point of this post, though, is not to complain about what amount to Early Adopter issues. I have a relatively high tolerance for software "funnies" and design compromises. Heck, I've written software in my day. What utterly bugs me is the following:
A few months ago, we moved from one Zip code to a neighboring one. According to the terms of the USPS license, which we had to get to be able to use the E-Stamp hardware "vault," we had to get a new "vault" and return the old one we'd been using and get a refund of the postage stored "inside." We went along with the program, having printed out about $80 of postage by the time we sent the unit back for replacement.
We got the refund check today, and the refund apparently covers only the unused postage. The E-Stamp folks did not pro-rate the "convenience fee" at all. A call to customer service confirmed this. "The convenience fee is not refundable," said the service representative, a point echoed by his supervisor, who tried to convince me that this was fair. My position is that it would have been fair to charge me a convenience fee as if I'd bought only the $80 of postage I'd printed (the percentage would have been higher; something like 10%), and refund the rest. As far as I'm concerned, though, right now I feel as if I've been charged $25 for the privilege of printing $80 of postage (a "convenience fee" of about 30%).
Given that I am feeling a bit taken-advantage-of, I'm going to have to think really hard about whether I'm going to drop any more money in these folks' pockets. My advice to anyone contemplating getting into "printing their own postage" is caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.
Then again maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion.
Cheers...
.
