I had a couple of business letters to post recently, so I thought I’d have a go with the Royal Mail’s online postage service. Several reasons really:
- I like trying out innovations
- I often run out of stamps
- I thought it’d look a bit more ‘professional’ for business invoices.
- I’d not yet got around to printing envelopes on my printer, and figured it was high time
The latter point proved to be the main gotcha - Whilst my laser printer (HP Laserjet 1200 as it happens) supports DL envelopes, I had all sorts of puzzling to go through when I discovered that the sample was skewed such that the right-hand side of the image was being missed.
I thought it might be that some Mac specific ‘hack’ was required, and hunted about for various solutions, before finally realising that I hadn’t set the Page size in Preview’s ‘Page Setup’ (Same problem would exist in Safari, which is what displays the resulting PDF by default). Set it to DL, and Robert was very much my fathers brother. Out came a perfectly printed envelope, complete with Royal Mail Logo, return address, one of those wizzy scannable block patterns, and the standard ‘first class prepaid’ symbol of a one digit, and a couple of black bars. Repeat for each address, and you’re done.
My main criticism has to be the website itself - it feels very clunky - and it rather ungraciously threw me out at the end, after having got my envelope to print, probably because I timed out. A few other grievances:
- It doesn’t allow you to ‘batch up’ addresses, so that you can print various images one after the other, at least if you’re doing a couple of DL envelopes rather than a page of labels.
- You don’t seem to be able to save destination addresses for later use
- It’s a bit inflexible with regard ‘floors’ in the addresses. The only prefix supported is “Flat”, which is ok for residential letters, but not for business addresses where businesses may occupy particular sections of a building.
- It’s no cheaper than it would be if you just bought a stamp, and a bit more hassle right now. It’d be ‘nice’ if they discounted it slightly to make it more appealing. As they no doubt pay ‘commission’ to shops who sell stamps on their behalf (otherwise, why would the shops do it?), it’s a bit off that they don’t pass on that to their direct customers to make it more attractive.
Ah well; It’s a great new service that means I don’t have to head out specifically to buy stamps for business letters any more. Plus I get to expense my postage costs easily now (hard to claim 32p for a stamp, which I frequently buy in books in shops and have no receipt for it), and I think the letters look a bit more professional, as well as a bit of ‘early adopter’ cred.
Not, of course, that the secretary’s are going to give a flying monkey’s when they rip open the envelopes to find my monthly invoices within… It’s tough being a geek you know. Really tough.
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