Category: business

08:54 – Barbara was over at her sister’s house yesterday, when I was struck by a cunning plan. I asked if Al would be willing to let me borrow his Windows laptop overnight, to which he kindly agreed. So I waited until this morning in case we got orders overnight, and then fired it up and attempted to pay for the postage labels in my cart. No joy. I got the same “payment method declined” error message on Al’s Windows laptop. Apparently, it’s not Linux that USPS hates. It’s me personally. USPS will not accept payment from me using any credit card or PayPal on any computer running any browser. I even tried creating a new USPS account and re-entering the label data. When I tried to pay, I got the same error.

Costco says my new Windows notebook system is to arrive tomorrow. It probably won’t work either. But I already have a stamps.com account set up, so I’ll install their client software and just start using stamps.com to generate my postage labels. They charge $16 per month, which’ll probably be less expensive than paying USPS directly because stamps.com discounts postage.

11:36 – The USPS Click-N-Ship website is still not accepting payments. I’ve done everything I can think of on my end. I’ve tried using two different browsers on two computers. I’ve cleared the cache and cookies. I’ve tried paying with three different credit cards, all of which are good and none of which worked, and I’ve tried paying via PayPal. No dice. The USPS website simply refuses to accept payments. I even created a new USPS Click-N-Ship account in Barbara’s name. It does the same thing. I’ve emailed USPS and gotten no response. I’ve called them repeatedly and spent long times on hold before finally giving up and trying again later.

As it turns out, I am able to ship some kits by using the PayPal shipping feature, but it’s less than ideal. It provides only some USPS Priority Mail options. The only two useful ones are the USPS PM Large Flat-Rate Box and the straight distance/weight Priority Mail option. Notably absent are the Regional-Rate Box options, and we use RR boxes for about 90% of our kit shipments. I just used the distance/weight PayPal PM option to ship a kit to Florida in a regional-rate box B. That would have cost $8.10 in postage if the RR box option was available with PayPal. It isn’t, so I shipped via the standard PM distance/weight rate, which was $8.55. The extra $0.45 on this shipment isn’t too bad, but that’s because it’s a nearby destination. The RR box B rate is the same as the 4-pound distance/weight PM rate, but our kits range from 5 to 7 pounds. The one I just shipped was at the 5-pound rate, but the differential increases rapidly with each extra pound and each additional zone. A typical kit is going to cost me several dollars extra to ship via PayPal’s USPS PM option relative to the USPS price for a RR box. But at least I can ship the kits. The problem is that PayPal has no International PM option. I’ve had a kit sitting waiting to ship to Denmark since Monday, and no way to generate postage for it.

As I was fuming about this problem yesterday, I had a scary thought. This is happening now, during a very slow time for kit sales. What if it happened in July, August, or September, when we might be shipping 50 or 100 kits a week? Right now, the problem is annoying; if it happened in August, it’d be disastrous. I simply can’t afford to take that risk.

So yesterday I looked again at UPS and FedEx. I set up a UPS account, and I intend to get set up to begin shipping via UPS Ground. (Air isn’t an option at this point because of UPS restrictions on hazardous chemicals.)

Comparing shipping costs between USPS and UPS is complicated. USPS provides free boxes. With UPS, I have to buy boxes, which cost around $1/each delivered. For our typical kits, which weigh 5 to 7 pounds, USPS Regional Rate costs from $6.16 for nearby zones to $14.42 for zone 7. For zone 8, we use Large Flat-Rate Boxes, which cost $15.80, versus $16.28 for a RR box B to zone 8, including Alaska and Hawaii. UPS Ground costs $7.30 to $11.61 for similar distance/weight, except that shipments to Alaska or Hawaii cost from $34.36 to $45.76. None of those include the numerous surcharges that UPS applies, including fees for picking up from or delivering to a residence, delivery area surcharges, package tracking surcharges, fuel surcharges, etc. etc. And UPS also charges to pick up the packages here, which costs $10 to $20 per week.

Just eyeballing things, my impression is that UPS will cost considerably more than USPS for shipments to the lower 48 states, and for 2 to 5 day delivery times versus 1 to 3 day for USPS. For shipments to Alaska and Hawaii, there’s no contest. USPS charges $15.80, while UPS will cost at least $40 and probably $50, $60, or more. International shipments are even worse. A kit that costs us $50 to ship via USPS Priority Mail International will cost two to three times that much via UPS. And that doesn’t count the very high customs brokerage fees that UPS charges and USPS doesn’t.

You know what? I just talked myself out of using UPS. Costs much more, slower deliveries, more hassles. Worst case, even when the USPS website isn’t working properly I can use PayPay to ship via USPS Priority Mail distance/weight or flat rate, at least to US addresses.

10:40 – We had only minor icing here, although yesterday there were dozens of car accidents locally and more homes lost power. There’s a chance of more icing this morning. Winter isn’t giving up easily. Barbara drove the 4X4 to work today.

Barbara handed me a postcard that arrived yesterday from the North Carolina Department of Revenue. It’s headed “2014 LLC ANNUAL REPORT REMINDER NOTICE” and says my corporate annual report is due by 15 April. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to do the required corporate annual report.

1. On the top line of the form, near the right side, I fill in today’s date.

2. On the second line, starting on the left, I fill in the payee, “NC Dept. of Revenue”.

3. In the box to the right of line 2, I fill in the amount, “200.00”.

4. On the line below that, I write out the amount, “Two-hundred-and-00/100”.

5. On the line below that, the memo line, I write out “2014 LLC Annual Report fee.

6. On the line to the right of the memo line, I sign.

12:37 – It’s funny. Shippers used to have two primary complaints against the USPS. First, that they didn’t offer day-specific delivery for Priority Mail. USPS merely said that typical delivery times were one to three business days. The second complaint, probably more important to most shippers, was that USPS tracking was pathetic. You basically got two data points: when it left your local post office and when it arrived at the destination. Nothing in the middle.

As far as the first point, I’ve been keeping track informally of the last 500 packages we’ve shipped. All but one of them arrive on the estimated day and in many cases the day before. For example, when I ship a package to a major west coast city on Saturday, the estimate is always two business days. But about 90% of the time, the package actually arrives Monday. Oh, yeah. The one exception was a package a shipped to a remote village in Alaska. USPS estimated three business days, but it took four. I suspect UPS or FedEx wouldn’t even have accepted this package for delivery, because the delivery address was something like 400 miles from the nearest small town. I guarantee you that package went on a bush plane for delivery. So, the day-specific thing is pretty much a non-issue, and has been for years.

As far as the second point, USPS has been updating their technology. Delivery staff have carried scanners for quite a while, but until recently they operated in off-line batch mode. Now the delivery staff have a bluetooth/cell link between their scanners and the USPS servers. When our mailman picks up and scans a package, I can check a minute or two later and it’s already showing up as accepted. USPS deployed this nationwide in late July, and now they proudly boast that every package gets scanned up to 11 times. And that’s the truth. I can now follow a package every step of the way from my front door to the recipients’. The only bad thing about that is that I now get up to 11 separate e-mails for each package I ship. Some mornings I have three or four full screens of email from USPS.