Monday, October 06, 2014

Walls, Markings, Weeds, on a Roll

Waterbury, Connecticut

I'll keep rolling along with these wall and weed shots collected over the summer, as there's no time for shooting right now.

On the TOP Platinum Print Offer front, we got thirty packages out today. While it beats standing in line at the Post Office, Ship 'N Click is slow as molasses in January. Not only do you have to key in each individual line, but as the number of shipments in your 'shopping cart' moves up (supposedly you can accumulate twenty before checking out) the program begins to take a second or more to respond to each keystroke! If you try to move ahead and let it catch up, the keystrokes it hadn't recorded yet start to appear in the next field. Yuk. We exited at fifteen, paid from the PayPal account that's been getting a lot of the sale receipts, then dealt with the—idiosyncratic, shall we say—system of printing out the labels and receipts to our laser printer using custom adhesive label sheets. Next set, the system responded to the keyboard normally at first, then the slowdown began on the fifth label. I gave up and decided to key in, buy, and print, five labels at a time.

Over a third of the sales were international, so those will need a different online form that includes customs declarations, then prints out two pages of forms on plain paper that you have to cut in half, insert into a self-adhesive plastic split-sleeve, then attach that to the package instead of a label. Then you have to wait while a clerk at the PO scans in every package. With the domestic ones you can just hand the clerk a whole stack and leave.

Happily, this has changed since the last time I did a bunch of International Priority Mail—you can now just drop off without waiting for personal attention from a clerk.


4 comments:

John Sarsgard said...

Just curious...did you check ups or fedex to see if they had anything better?

Carl Weese said...

I didn't check this time, but last I did there were similar problems. Plus, the PO is two miles away, while the nearest UPS and FedEx centers are two towns away.

MikeR said...

I believe you can sign up with UPS so that they would pick up your shipments. I did that to ship a DesignJet printer that I sold on eBay, to Seattle. The shipping carton wouldn't fit into any car I had.

Carl Weese said...

Mike, I'll certainly look into it for "next time." Today Click 'N Ship is completely messed up. We did a batch of expensive international labels, paid with PayPal, which was billed, and then for nearly an hour the system refused to acknowledge payment, with no way to find out what was wrong. After it finally registered the payment and we printed the labels, we tried to do a new set of a few domestic labels to see if things were working. They were not. Instead of starting a new order ticket it insisted on tacking a new label on to the old one, as if it was back thinking that hadn't been paid. We deleted the added item and signed out. When I tried to get customer service I was told they had exceptionally heavy traffic on the phone...gee, I wonder why?