Stamps.com is Too Little for Too Much
Written: Jan 21 '02 (Updated Apr 06 '04)
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When I first came across Stamps.com last year, I was thrilled. Recently, the USPS had revamped our local post office. The changes were supposedly for the better, but the result had been very long lines with a minimum of a half hour wait. I hated going to the post office!
So when Stamps.com advertised $20 worth of free postage to try their new service, I was paying attention. It seemed simple enough: use your own printer to print out postage. I signed up.
THE GOOD
The main point of Stamps.com is convenience of not having to go to the post office. It was easy enough to charge postage to my debit card and print it out on my laser printer. Stamps.com verified all of the addresses, so this also helped with the routing of my mail, helping it get there faster.
I kept all my addresses for my personal use and bills in their address book. As I added them, I verified them with their online database to make sure I had them all correct. Whenever I had something to mail, I just logged into the Stamps.com server, and chose an address. I would put an envelope in my laser printer and it would print out.
I could add custom sizes to the envelope selection, which was great for all the birthday cards, thank you cards, invitations, and birth announcements I sent out over the year I used the service. I had to measure the envelopes and put the dimensions in, then I usually would cut a plain piece of paper the same size as the envelope to run through the printer as a test. It was a bit of a pain, but it was a problem I felt I could solve easily enough.
THE BAD
My first problem came from those envelopes that come with our bills. In order to use them, I would have to buy special stickers and print out a whole sheet of these electronic stamps as well as coding to go on the envelope. Usually I would just throw away the envelopes that came with my bills and use my own envelopes that I'd run through the printer instead. Not that much of a big deal, really.
The second problem came when I was printing out my Christmas cards. I went to print out 42 envelopes. Well, of course there was a problem. I only got about nine out and the whole computer locked up on me. The only way to get the rest of the cards printed that I needed was to reprint them, getting charged a second time for the postage. When I called customer service at Stamps.com, they put in a report for me. About a week to ten days later, I heard back. I was refunded five dollars. I was missing ten dollars worth of postage, and they only credited me back five because they said I couldn't prove it. The mail is metered, so they should have been able to trace it and see how much was actually mailed on the meter. Even if they had come back a month later and said they saw the discrepancy, I would've felt much better.
The third problem came on Mother's Day when I had an oversized card to send. I went to run the envelope through the printer, and Stamps.com would not allow me to print is due to its size. My printer could handle it just fine, but the service wouldn't allow me to print the postage for it.
I also could not mail packages since I had opted not to buy a postal scale and attach it to my computer. All these little things the service wouldn't do meant I was making trips to the post office anyway, and waiting on the lines I wanted to avoid.
The final straw for me was the recent price increase. The basic plan up until now cost $1.99 per month. I thought that was worth it for the convenience of not having to wait on lines all the time. At the end of June, we received a notice that they were raising the price to $4.65 a month. That's more than a 125% increase!
I canceled my account with them, and now the software won't let me back in to my address book. Any addresses I'd changed on there I don't have access to, and there are a few that I never changed in my address book I write in because I got so used to having Stamps.com.
Would I go through this again? No. I just don't think all of the little things about this service that are problems are really worth the convenience.
© 2002 Patti Aliventi
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Member: Patti Aliventi
Location: Mount Washington Valley, New Hampshire
Reviews written: 2070
Trusted by: 687 members
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