Coder’s Eye

I’ve been shipping a lot of packages lately. It was a big pain, and now it is not. That’s my basic review of Endicia for Mac.

Manual shipping

When I first started shipping, I’d manually label each package. My handwriting is terrible, so it looked like a retarded monkey wrote the label, and I wasted several bubble-mailers by boneheaded misprinting. It took more time than you might think to label each package. But that time paled next to the time it took to stand in line at the Post Office to mail the things. Ouch.

Automated shipping - the equipment

I purchased a 25-pound USB scale for $85 from Endicia. It works very nicely from within the software. Just put the package on the scale and click “weigh”.

My label printer is a Dymo 400 Turbo from Label city for $109, and I bought a roll of three-part internet postage labels #30387.(Here’s a coupon) for $15.

It all worked right away on my G5, with no fiddling about, pleasing me greatly.

Endicia Account

To use Endicia, you create an account and pay a monthly fee. I’m using the “premium account” at $15.95 per month. This lets me print unlimited postage, creates customs forms for me, and gives me access to the cheaper-than-USPS Endicia insurance.

Then, I attached a credit card to the account and bought an initial pool of postage. You can add more at any time from the website or from the software itself.

The software

I am pleased to say that the software has performed flawlessly so far. I’ve shipped about a dozen things over the weekend, and been pleasantly surprised at how seamlessly it works.

• Get an order, copy the address from the confirmation email
• Paste into Endicia’s address area.
• Hit validate, this reformats it according to what the post office in that country wants as a standard. (Very helpful indeed.)
• Select the type of shipping.
• Click “Weigh”.
• Put a note in logging area about what this is (so you can look it up later). There is an area for an order number as well.
• Click print, then confirm on the next page
• Drop the packages in the bulk-mail bin and the post-office and skip the long, slow lines!

Conclusion

This wonderful, easy-to-use system has cut my shipping time down from 4-5 minutes each to less than 2, and made the drop-off part almost instantaneous. I ship every day, so that alone is saving me 10-30 minutes. Add up all that time savings and you’ll quickly see why this is a complete winner of a setup for me. I rarely give such unreserved recommendations, but so far they’ve really earned it.

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