Our $240/month Pitney Bowes lease is about to expire and I'm considering switching over to stamps.com. We're a small law office and it seems like stamps.com would make sense ($16/month). Any bad experiences out there with it?
I have been hesitant to switch because of questions about the reliability of the label printing. Anyone use them?
really thought i posted about this yesterday. i've used them both. printing labels and stamps from stamps.com is really easy. i thought pitney bowes was a pain to deal with. the meter is awesome, though. one good thing about the meter is your mail is already post marked. so if you need to get something out with today's date, you can mark it and drop it in the mail tomorrow. with stamps.com, you're just putting a stamp on it. little, i know. but convenience is a factor.
Having spent many years running USPS plants around the country, I'll tell you the difference. Both are great systems for getting your mail ready to go out the door. The difference comes when the mail gets to the plant. Mail that still has to be cancelled (re stamps.com) has to go through a cancelling system before it goes to the first sortation machine. In a big city, that can delay the mail getting through the system by as much as 4 or 5 hours - which can make a difference as to whether that piece of mail gets on the best transportation to the destination. A piece of metered mail (re Pitney-Bowes) bypasses the cancellation process, and gets into the sortation process much more quickly. Where you are, in El Paso, it should not make that much difference - El Paso doesn't have enough volume to have long delays in cancelling mail. If stamps.com is that much cheaper, I say go for it. In a bigger place, especially some place like Dallas or Houston, if you want better mail service, meter your mail, and stay with P-B. Most plants are hitting the high 90's in % delivered in the overnight area - the local area around that plant. If all of your business is local, don't worry about getting the mail metered. But if you are mailing stuff out state-wide or nationally, you will often save a day of travel time for that piece of mail by metering the mail, and getting it to the plant early in the afternoon (by 4 or 5). Let me know if you have additional mail questions - either post here or PM me.
