Royal Mail SmartStamp service

[mjhuk]

Hi. I use the Royal Mail SmartStamp service and it has saved me lots of time and hassle posting items to buyers.

FYI SmartStamp is a service from the Royal Mail that lets you print the postage you need 24/7. It doesn't matter if you are sending a big parcel or a small letter.

You can find details on the Royal Mail website at http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/j...mediaId=600023

Happy eBidding!

[MrsMuffy]

I think you still have to take things to the PO to post even if you have a smart stamp on it, so you still have to queue, The post office who takes the parcels does not get a penny for accepting them, so there is no income for them, No income means NO POST OFFICE, So then what will all the pensioners with the pension card and people on benefits do and all the people who don't use smart stamps, There are very few banks. Also around the PO there are usually several small shops who rely on customers of the PO getting their money and coming and spending some of it locally, They will lose some of their customers, so then there will be no small shops, it is a knock on effect. I know, I have a shop near a post office, and when the government stopped the pension books, my takings went down, that is why I started selling online to keep my business going.
So Save Our Post Offices Please use them, and please keep shopping locally, before the supermarkets take over.

[lofty100e]

An alternative to taking the packages to the PO, is to take them to your local sorting office.

The only down-side to this is it can be difficult to raise a response late in the day. Our local one is open for customer enquiries from 7am to midday; but as that is aimed at people collecting mail it may be best to ask before turning up with a load of post.

[HannaHolly]

I would only use smart stamp if the post office was paying me to do so- after all it's my printer, paper, ink and time - So i'm doing the post offices job for them!

[lindylupins]

Hi. I use the Royal Mail SmartStamp service and it has saved me lots of time and hassle posting items to buyers.

FYI SmartStamp is a service from the Royal Mail that lets you print the postage you need 24/7. It doesn't matter if you are sending a big parcel or a small letter.

You can find details on the Royal Mail website at http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/j...mediaId=600023

Happy eBidding!

I joined this service a month and half ago and HATE IT!!!! Not only is it costing me £4.99 a month (which will cease once the 3 month minimum period is up), its costing me ink, special labels you have to buy, time and believe me, I dont think i would recommend it to anyone. I love my local post office and find its more of a social occassion when i visit them, and find the printing off of my own labels very time consuming AND it will deduct the money for the postage BEFORE the label is printed, so if when you get to the "PRINT" stage and you dont think it looks quite right, if you dont actually print off that label you have lost that money ~ something i have done on many occasions, so its actually costing me more like a tenner a month!!! Not happy with the set up of it at all. Yesterday I lost almost £4 as couldnt get the labels to print, it messed up my printer big time ~ had labels queued up to print but the printer wouldnt budge ~ solution?? reboot the computer which meant of course i lost that data queued in the printer......that decided for me NOT to bother with it again, so took my parcels to post office, had good old chat and moan about smart Stamp!
Also, didnt realise until after i had joined the scheme that even by me taking my parcels to my local post office they dont count towards traffic going thru their office, and as I definately do not want my local post office to be one of those that closes, another reason why i have decided to give smart Stamp a miss. I personally found it took me longer to print off my own labels than taking them to the PO and getting them to do all the printing, sticking etc , and issuing me with Cert of Posting.
I suppose a lot of it depends on how many parcels/letters etc you have to post, but as I now only post on a tuesday and Friday I do have anything up to 20 parcels, and I was finding it was taking me a good couple of hours to get all the stamps printed off, especially when it was mucking up, or I had to reboot ~ so I found the whole experience very stressful (and was just a shame yesterday there wasnt any reps from the Post Office when I called in as I could have let off all that anger and frustration out on him and would have told him exactly what i thought of his Smart Stamp lol)

[lindylupins]

Liked the idea of Smartstamp initially and would thank the original poster for mentioning it.

But I am not keen on paying £5 a month just for the honour of printing my own stamps and saving the Post Office from employing someone !!! It seems daft to me. If they made if free I might use it. I probably dont make £5 a month in Sales here on Ebid.

Have to agree with Mouse Trapps "Tirade" in that you still have to walk to the PO & Queue to actually post it.

If the PO just made leter boxes bigger problem solved.

As an aside does anyone else have the problem of letter boxes being overflowing - where I live sometimes you could actually reach in and take letters out !!!

dont know about post boxes round here as dont bother posting direct to letter boxes ~ waste of time as most of my packages are A4 sized envelopes and the boxes arent even wide enough to take that!!!! How stupid is that? Spose they expect you to fold the envelope in half in order to post it, but then the contents would be ruined hence why it states on the outside PLEASE DO NOT BEND ~ something that must be beyond comprehension to most posties as they just dont understand that wording ~ the A4 board backed envelopes i have had squashed into my letter box when it states clearly in red DO NOT BEND...............do they think they are clever or are they just illiterate? Probably a bit of both, as even if you claimed compensation from the post office you dont get the postage charge refunded, so you lose out all ways. About time the Royal Mail had some serious competition they would pull their socks up then.
On a positive though, the royal Mail were excellent over the christmas Period and didnt misplace, lose, pilfer or damage anything i posted out or received, so must say Well done for all their hard work ~ just wish my postie would deliver my mail BEFORE 1pm, but there ya go, cant have it all ways I spose.

[lofty100e]

The situation with the delivery times is a management decision. From what I am told all walk-men/women have larger rounds and therefore aren't always finished by lunch-time as they used to. As a compensation for this they are rostered a day off each week.

It's always the same, what the customer thinks doesn't matter; particularly where you effectively have a hostage situation. What other options are there to Royal Mail at a reasonable price?

[BAGHAG999]

Why pay for smartstamp when the online postage is free.
I use it some times you have a choice of labels to use.
Only problem is it will only print one at a time.

[julescasualwear]

I have used SmartStamp since it started just about and it is a fab system.

Okay so it costs 4.99 per month, ink, labels, but thats what you charge to your customers. If a package costs £1.27 to send, charge £1.49. It is for postage and packaging after all. And if stamps dont print correctly just put a claim in, I have only put 2 claims in the past year and have had no problems.

My local post office is a main branch so dont feel guilty about them losing business And I do post quite a bit, and cant be jugglying all these parcels. And post offices, well ours, has a place to dump all pre-paid post. So no queing at all, unless you want to send by recorded delivery.

I used it for hundereds of parcels over xmas, some of the prints didnt come out great, but only 1 parcel went missing

So overall its a thumbs up from me

[diorella24]

Bending envelopes..? I'd love it if bending envelopes was all our post-personage would do. Few months ago my letterbox got ripped off the front of the door by her enthusiastically trying to shove a big cardboard figleaves box through it.. then pulling it out again. When I complained at the sorting office I was given a number to call which was nothing to do with Royal Mail.. Because of things like that, I don't really feel like getting SmartStamp and doing their jobs for them either, but that's just me, I'm bitter :-)

Dxx