Online Shipping Labels

One of the challenges of owning a small business is being able to take a vacation or work remotely without losing the ability to service customers. This is particularly true if there is a product involved which you are shipping out yourself. There are many services available to handle order fullfillment, but many small businesses choose to keep packaging and shipping orders in-house if volume is low or margins tight. One solution we have used is to generate online shipping labels using the major services; US Post Office has Click N Ship and DHL, FedEx and UPS all offer online services to generate mailing labels and pay for the postage.

The advantage to this for the small business is to be able to process orders and prepare the shipping labels remotely, then print them to a service like J2 (which we use for electronic fax). The software from J2 will capture any print to a file so it can be mailed to someone else in a graphics format like TIFF. We give a friend a supply of product pre-packaged and they just print the label and tape it onto a package. Of course, more complex product mixes will require more work on the part of the “hands back home”.

The best part about using US Post Office Click-N-Ship is that you get free delivery confirmation, and have a historical record of shipping packages and payments. This makes the accounting for shipment costs much easier and we use it whether traveling or at home.