Online Postage Ships and Handles With Convenience

Wall Street may not think electronic postage is anything to write home about, but for time-crunched consumers, it delivers on their promise of convenience.

That’s the strength of two relatively new Internet postage vendors, Stamps.com and E-Stamp, which allow consumers and businesses to buy postage at their leisure.

Stamps.com and E-Stamp let people use their PCs as postage meters for domestic mail, although each employs a different method of printing that postage. Stamps.com requires an Internet connection; E-Stamp uses a small device that connects to the PC and stores postage and account information. Both allow users, for a fee, to print first-class, Priority, Express and parcel post.

Both systems also offer address correction (a terrific feature for bad typists and for those who--shame on us!--don’t routinely use those extra four digits of the ZIP code). They also interface with various address books and other business software programs on your PC and have good customer support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

After an enthusiastic welcome on Wall Street last year, investors have cooled toward both companies, whose stocks are off more than 85% this year. Does that mean consumers should write off PC postage?

Not necessarily. Like all new technology, these programs have some problems, as my recent experiences found. But having used Stamps.com for a couple of months and E-Stamp for a couple of weeks, I won’t be fighting to stand in post office lines again any time soon.

A document I needed to send to a friend in Ontario, Calif., is a good example of why. I knew I wouldn’t have time to stop by a post office before work, and that it would be closed by the time I got off work.

So I fired up the PC and printer, weighed the envelope on a postal scale (available at most office supplies stores for as little as $8), typed in the delivery address and printed out the exact postage I needed, using a fluorescent Internet postage label. It was just after midnight Friday.

I dropped the envelope in the mail later that morning, and it arrived Saturday afternoon. Fortunately, I didn’t print the postage until after midnight. That’s important because postal regulations require that the piece be mailed on the date that appears on the label. (Adjust accordingly for late-night and weekend printings.)

Still, these programs don’t mean you’ll never face the post office again. If you need insurance through the post office, you can pay for it online, but you have to go to a post office to finalize it. You can save a trip to the post office by buying insurance through Universal Parcel Insurance Coverage on the Internet at https://www.u-pic.com.

Registered mail requires a trip to a post office. And it’s still much easier to slap a stamp on an envelope and scrawl an address than to run it through the printer and hope that the Information Based Indicia, the digitally encoded bar code, comes out correctly.

These two programs are not necessarily aimed at individual consumers, although neither offers bulk mail, an important business tool. Stamps.com, which has 230,000 customers, initially focused on individuals but is broadening its reach to businesses, said John Payne, chief executive of the Santa Monica-based company. E-Stamp, which has 97,000 customers, has been focused on businesses from the outset, said Robert Ewald, president and chief executive of the Mountain View, Calif.,-based company.

That doesn’t mean the services won’t work for individuals. Here’s how they delivered in my recent tests.

Stamps.com

I received a CD-ROM by mail (although I could have downloaded it from the site, https://www.stamp.com) and the installation was as smooth as any software I’ve ever tried. Within an hour, I had chosen a user name and password and applied for a postal license, the latter an easy process that took only a few minutes. The license arrived at my home in a few days. I was in business.

I had some questions in the beginning that I hoped might be answered by the “real time� live tech support people, but I never heard as much as a peep when I asked my questions online. I did, however, always get a reply when I sent an e-mail or called.

Because Stamps.com requires an Internet connection, you are subject to the whims of its site and those of your Internet Service Provider. On at least one occasion, I could not connect with Stamps.com because of a problem with its server, and tech support was unaware of the problem until I called.

On a Sunday afternoon, I was once again thwarted getting on to the site. This time, however, Stamps.com’s tech services told me the problem was with America Online, my ISP. I logged off and logged back on and got right in. An unreliable Internet connection will prove annoying to the impatient consumer, of which I am one.

It’s almost as annoying as a “printer misfeed,� a nice way of saying that I fed the address label for a package in upside down. I had just paid $4.20 for postage that was unusable. Both services credit customers for such mistakes. Stamps.com asks for proof, which I provided by mailing in the misprint. But it also cost me 33 cents to mail it, so it’s a disincentive to try to get credit for a problem printing a stamp. (E-Stamp says it does not always require proof, so getting a refund for a 33-cent stamp won’t necessarily cost 33 cents.)

E-Stamp

The E-Stamp installation didn’t go nearly as smoothly as Stamps.com, for a variety of reasons. When I tried to order the $49.99 starter kit online (https://www.estamp.com), it rejected my credit cards. When I asked why by e-mail, the reply, which came quickly, suggested it was just a glitch and that I try again. I did, got right through, ordered the kit and applied for a second postal license. The kit, including an “electronic vault� that stores postage and account information, arrived six days later and included $50 worth of postage, making it essentially free.

As I was completing the installation of the software, I hit a dead end trying to convince the program that I had connected the vault to my computer (a Sager notebook and a Canon BJC1000, a low-end printer).

E-Stamp’s tech support suggested I call Sager and reconfigure my printer port. I did the next morning and tried again to install the vault that night. No luck. The tech support person said he would research it and get back to me. The next night, he left a message on my home phone suggesting I try the vault on another computer.

A colleague tried it on her home computer. She had no luck either. Finally, E-Stamp tech support suggested I return the vault and get my money back.

After a call to E-Stamp identifying myself as a Los Angeles Times reporter, I received another vault, not a refund. (E-Stamp says that less than 10% of its vaults are defective and that tech services should have offered a replacement.) Success. But when I went to print the first envelope, I got only black bars where the addresses should have been.

More time with tech support. This time the technician had me download a Canon printer driver, and this time, it worked just fine. (In all likelihood, my system was to blame for this one, not E-Stamp.) My first envelopes were perfect--after two weeks and a half-dozen phone calls.

E-Stamp uses an address-matching CD that helps verify mailing information, and this worked fine until five days ago when I needed to print postage for a package to be mailed to Honolulu. It said I had an incorrect address and would not let me override it.

I tried the same address on Stamps.com, and it printed just fine, adding only four-digits to the ZIP code. If the package is returned, I’ll know E-Stamp was correct.

On my system, E-Stamp envelopes print slightly faster than Stamps.com (between two and five seconds faster on two tests); E-Stamp’s best time was one minute and 22 seconds for letter-size envelope, and I’m sure it would be faster if I had a better printer.

Because E-Stamp does not require a connection to the Internet when printing stamps, it’s never delayed by a service-provider problem or an issue with its Web site. There’s nothing more aggravating than waiting and waiting, only to be told the connection can’t be achieved.

Nothing, perhaps, except waiting in a slow-moving line at the post office. Despite the technological problems, I’m sticking with electronic postage that lets me be the postmaster of my fate.

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Catharine Hamm is deputy travel editor for The Times. She can be reached at [email protected]. To read past E-review columns, go to http://ukobiw.net./ereview.