Sen. Carper Reacts to Postal Regulatory Commission’s Planned 6 Month Review of Postal Proposal to End Saturday Delivery

USPS moving Mojave mail processing operations to Bakersfield – postalnews blog.

Shipping Supply, LLC has acquired CorrugatedMailers.com.  With this domain name we plan to create a product specific landing page that will drive traffic to our main site ShippingSupply.com.

We are pleased to once again work with ecommerce management and consulting firm Groove Commerce, who will develop and design the landing page for this project.  The landing page will resemble and seamlessly integrate with our main site.

The increase in traffic generated by the CorrugatedMailers.com will allow us to showcase our world class customer service and grow our business.

Shipping Supply, LLC has acquired WhiteBubbleMailers.com and PolyBubbleMailers.com.  With these domain names we plan to create product specific landing pages that will drive traffic to our main site ShippingSupply.com.

We are pleased to once again work with ecommerce management and consulting firm Groove Commerce, who will develop and design the landing pages for this project.  The landing pages will resemble and seamlessly integrate with our main site.

The increase in traffic generated by the WhiteBubbleMailers.com and PolyBubbleMailers.com will allow us to showcase our world class customer service and grow our business.

PRC to Review Proposal to End Saturday Mail Delivery | Postal Employee Network.

OIG seeks vendor for internet based nationwide video surveillance system for postal facilities – postalnews blog.

5 or 6 Day Postal Delivery? | Postal Employee Network.

What do you hate about your parcel carrier? The number one complaint about UPS and FedEx was accessorial charges. (Morgan Stanley Parcel Annual Best Practices 2009 Survey)

Accessorial charges are better known as surcharges, additional charges, ancillary fees, or adjustments. There are more than 90 of these add-on charges! Here is a link to the UPS 2010 Surcharge and Accessorial Price Increases.

The survey also found that in 2009, 11.5% of the overall transportation costs were for accessorial charges. What are these charges? Here are the top ten:

1. Fuel Surcharges
2. Address corrections
3. Residential delivery
4. Delivery Area Surcharges
5. Rural Area Surcharges
6. Dimensional charges
7. Saturday delivery
8. Declared value (insurance)
9. Additional Handling
10. Large Package

The big reason why businesses hate these charges is that most of these additional charges are not included in the published price and are added to your bill after you have shipped the package, making it difficult if not impossible to recoup from your customers. If you are processing your packages using technology, you have to correctly maintain your technology and enter all the data fields. As you may recall from my last blog entry, How Are You Losing Money in Shipping?, one of the reasons a client was losing over $100,000 a year in shipping because the person processing the packages was not entering the dimensions of the packages in the carrier’s shipping system.

How can this happen you wonder?

In this particular case, the problem was that my client had outsourced her shipping to a third party logistics company. I called them to find out why they were not entering the dimensions and was told that they didn’t do it because dimensional rating was only for air shipments, not ground. They are wrong! This was a company that bragged about their expertise in shipping packages that had been doing this for 30 years and they did not know that UPS and FedEx charge based on the dimensions of the package for ground shipments as well as air! Here is the link to how to compute a dimensional weight, A Quick & Easy Way to Calculate Dimensional Weight and also here is a link, Parcel Shipping Ain’t Easy, to a very funny video about it. My client was depending on an expert and the expert didn’t know that they didn’t know!

PlantVerifiedDropShipments.pdf

Informative and useful presentation slides from the Plant Verified Drop Shipment webinars and session at the National Postal Forum.  Mailers who drop ship or are interested in drop shipping should review.  In addition, mailers and the USPS should make this presentation available to the Bulk Mail Entry Unit clerks, so everyone is on the same page on the process and the requirements.

The Drop Ship Checklist here was also updated.  However, the automated notice that a document has changed that alerts me to these updates, contain no detail whatsoever as to WHAT may have changed.

Postmaster General John E. Potter told a Senate subcommittee today that while the Postal Service continues on a path of growth and cost reductions, legislative change is still needed to put the Postal Service back on the path of financial stability.

Testifying before the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management* of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Potter asked for a restructuring of the payment obligation required of the Postal Service to prefund retiree health benefits and that an adjustment be allowed for the current six-day-a- week mail delivery schedule.

USPS News Release: Postmaster General Tells Subcommittee Postal Service Moving Forward But Still Needs Help.

From the RFP Q & A document cited in my previous post -

Q 6: Is the USPS allowed to develop competing products and services that are already being provided by companies in the private sector, when such competition potentially could bring economic harm to some of the USPS’s own best customers?

R 6: The Postal Service believes that it has the authority to promote and increase the use of direct mail by small and medium sized enterprises, to the benefit the overall mailing industry. The Postal Service’s goal is to provide services that continue to add value to the mail process and reach as many customers as possible with solutions that can be offered nationwide.

————
Think carefully about this before sharing any proprietary information or marketing ideas and suggestions with the USPS.  Read through the Q & A document, and note how many times this is the stock response from the Postal Service:

Q 8: Ref. Sec. 1.2 – Can we be provided with a copy of this research/assessment, or at a minimum the associated executive summaries
R 8: This information is considered proprietary and confidential.

The USPS has posted answers to questions posed by prospective partners in its proposed “Direct Mail Solution”, which would seek an organization “to partner with the USPS to develop; host; and market a go-to-market strategy.” Full details of the proposal are here, and a Word version of the Q&A is available here.

USPS Q&A on proposed “Direct Mail Solution” partnership – postalnews blog.

Per the DMM Advisory today, the USPS Standard Mail incentive sale has been approved by the Postal Rate Commission.  Details can be found in the posted Federal Register notice.

The Sale will provide a 30 percent credit on postage paid by Standard Mail customers mailing an increased volume of letters and flats above a predetermined threshold. The program period will run from July 1 through September 30, 2010.

Invitation letters will automatically be sent to eligible customers by May 1, 2010. Mailers who want to participate in the program and believe that they meet the minimum eligibility criteria, of mailing 350,000 Standard Mail letters or flats within the program qualification period, may request a review of their eligibility by contacting summersale@usps.gov no later than May 15, 2010.

The Postal Service’s Union Problem | Cato @ Liberty.

Full-Service Intelligent Mail USPS Release #4 is now slated for implementation November 2010. This release will be a “big-brother is watching – and charging – you” release. Intelligent Mail barcode Mail Quality reports will be beefed up, in order to support the USPS non-compliance revenue stream. Instead of looking at compliance issues as a way to improve the mailstream, the Postal Service is more focused on catching errors and charging for them – in most cases the loss of the tiny Intelligent Mail discount and Full-Service benefits for Full-Service Intelligent Mail users. This will make the risks associated with presenting Full-Service mailings all the more difficult to alleviate. The USPS will also be implementing reports designed to catch and charge those receiving Full Service “Free” ACS and then failing to update the addresses within the required time frame.

Other areas having to do with Full-Service compliance penalties include verification of the following requirements:
*Tray, Sack, and Pallet tag/placard correctness and 45-day unique barcode identifiers
*Mailpiece barcode 45-day uniqueness
*FAST Drop Ship appointments
*Barcode Mailer ID and Service Type Code correctness
*Customer/Supplier Agreement verification
These verifications can be done all the way to the piece level, so the non-compliance ramifications can end up being assessed on a portion or on the entire mailing. IMb verifications will be done via the eDocumentation, it is important to note that the risk carries all the way through to delivery; an error can be picked up at any time in the mailstream – not just at verification. Loss of both the discount and any Full-Service ACS information is always going to be a possibility, with little room for recourse from the mailer or mail owner.

On a positive note, the USPS changed the Standard Mail Full Service ACS timeframe requirement from 30 days (a near-impossibility), to the more reasonable 95 day compliance timeframe. The industry, and several vociferous MTAC Associations, have long lobbied for the change. No idea what finally prompted the USPS to take the appropriate action and adjust, but it is a welcome change.