christopher-hill.com

Online Postage

Right, thought I'd bung up a quick post about the Royal Mail's online postage, now that I've used it a few times. In the whole, it's a useful service - with caveats.
Good things:
- As long as you have plenty of stick on labels, you won't have the annoying thing of needing to post something then realising that you've got no stamps and have to trudge down to the Post Office or Smiths or somewhere.
- If you've got a non-standard packet or package (yes, there's a difference) you don't have to go to the Post Office to get it weighed and that, you can do it all yourself.
- The fact that the validated address is being printed out in a format they dictate means that you are increasing the chances that your mail will be delivered quickly and correctly, as it is more likely to whiz through their automatic scanning gubbins that they have (I've worked in a sorting office, I know what I'm talking about here).
Bad things:
- If you buy something with Special Delivery postage, you still have to traipse down to the Post Office to hand it over (they don't tell you this until after you've bought it) and when you get there they don't know what to do with it. There really is no point buying Special Delivery online.
- There is a bug which means that the town of the delivery address always gets added to the town of the return address, e.g. I just sent a birthday card to my cousin in Soham, and my return address showed as "Soham, Sheffield".
- For some reason it didn't print quite right on my Mac/HP printer at home, but might just have been a setup problem as the ones I printed at work were fine.
So there you go, useful in some situations, not in others. Like most things in life.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006 7:41 PM