On Wednesday night, as we prepared the last package for shipment, we discovered we had run out of shipping labels!
Commercial Shipping
To help streamline our shipping process, we use a product called Endicia. For a modest monthly fee, we get several advantages that we can pass on to our customers. Perhaps most importantly, we get to ship packages at the Commercial Base rate instead of paying the regular retail price. This helps keep your shipping costs down when you buy from us. There are other price breaks for large volume, but the next one comes when we ship 5,000 packages a year. That might not happen for a while!
Another advantage of this service is being able to print labels for everything at home. When we first started, we had to run to the post office to ship every sale. In fact, we were using up old stamps and had to go to the retail counter every time. Now, we ship multiple packages most days and can have them picked up at our home. (While we have and upload the tracking information for your package as soon as we print the label, we won’t notify you it’s been shipped until the USPS had taken possession of your package. We dislike the experience of being told our order has shipped and then finding it doesn’t reach the shipper for another several days.)
At first, we printed the labels on plain paper. Then we had to cut the labels out and tape them securely to the envelopes. That process involved lots of tape, paper and labor. The label generation software however, allows us to print with a thermal printer on a sticker. We only need to peel it off and stick it on your package – a significant savings of time and effort for only three cents per label!
Happy to Run Out?
New shipping labels should arrive tomorrow, but running out confirmed that we have now shipped 1100 packages at commercial rates. For us, that sure seems like a lot of orders to have shipped and we’re celebrating having served so many customers.
