Printing Postage On-Line

 

I have used this facility from Royal Mail several times and feel that in general it is a very good and professional system. There are a few issues though.

Good Features

1. The ability to print as many times as needed. I have a rather old laser, that isn’t too smart and sometimes jams with envelopes.

2. The e-mails that say you’ve posted. Not exactly a proof of posting, but good enough for many purposes. Did I actually post that letter? When did I send it?

3. The general structure of the site, which means you get the address right.

Bugs

1. Sometimes I have tried several times to submit a label/stamp and it tells me to try later. I’ve been persistent and not failed, but would put many off.

2. It did confuse my return address with a line in the recipient’s address. Not repeated since. Could have been finger trouble, but doubt it.

3. When you print a label/stamp to say Ireland, it returns to print another overseas stamp. Should return to the general print again.

4. I sent a letter to a company with their own postcode – Dyson Ltd. The system wanted me to put a house name, flat number etc. in. In the end I entered Dyson Ltd. as a building name.

5. There is no place when sending to a business to enter the job title.

Requested Features

1. A simpler interface so I don’t have to click so many times to print a First Class label/stamp. Look at Amazon’s One Click approach.

2. Saved recipients so if you send a lot of letters to the same person, you login and print.

3. The ability to cut and paste an address from Outlook, bypassing the address checker. I can understand that this might not be easy, but I have written a lot of software that decodes names and addresses and extracts the post code.

4. The ability to upload a list of names and addresses and then print them on labels. Why not allow people to update their Christmas card lists in this way? You shouldn’t lose them like we all do.

5. The timeout is too short. It should also remember you when you return.

6. A small point is that I always address letters to Ireland as Eire. This may be wrong, but I can’t change it.

Summary

I'll give it about eight out of ten for now.