Royal Mail Smart Stamp Free Trial

katchambers

Ken-Dodds-Hairy-Knodule wrote:

So basically what you are saying is "ME! ME! ME!"..

Or in politer terms "I'm far more interested in profit than community".

There's no reason to be rude. The thing is you don't know how horrible my local post office is. It is run by a horrible, rude lady who gets everything wrong, never smiles, never says thank you and doesn't even look at you, it's in a dingy local shop and the queues are always horendous so why would I want to use that? There is no community in that so why not try to dig myself out of my horrible debt by being a bit 'selfish' and using my printer and the post box? I can't see what it so wrong with that! Isn't one of the points of MSE to help people get themselves out of debt? Because that can't happen when I only have time to send packages twice a week because I have to go all the way to the post office, I get much better feedback now that I do it online.

Kat

chrise136

Lots of positive comments about royalmail's smartstamp but I have not had a happy experience of them. I paid my £5 subscription fee and my 1st monthly fee of £4.99. I successfully printed off some stamps but some failed. The trial print was successful but when I went to print the actual postage it often failed but still billed me for the failed print. This happened on a few occasions often when I was sending mail abroad, so it got a bit expensive and frustrating. I know I could have written to them for a refund but how could you prove something that had not printed. They continued to take aout £4.99 per month.I have now cut my losses and cancelled my subscription and gone back to my friendly post office. I received back only £1.79 even though I had spent very little. Apparently if you have spent something in one month you are not entitled to a refund for that month

money-4-nothing

I know it's a old thread but i just wanted to get my 2 cents worth in.

I work at a big post office, we have 12 counters and most days people still have to queue for up to 20 minutes and that's with all counters open. So you can imagine the number of people will have using our post office. Come at the end of the month when it's car tax and you might as well pitch up a tent.

We have whats called a drop off counter which people can just go up to to drop off prepaid and franked mail... saves them queuing and stops the queue from building up any more then it is. The old dears don't like it because they think they are jumping the queue. The only time it's a bit awkward is when they want recorded delivery slips stamped... but our security guard who deals with all the mail quickly borrows one of our stamps and stamps the slips. People with special deliveries still need to queue because the mail need to be processed through the system.

We don't mind people bringing in prepaid mail but not Special deliveries because we don't get the sale if it's prepaid. We (the office) get 20p per special delivery and every 3 months it gets shared out between us all.

Now, I sell a lot on eBay and play.com (playtrade) and sometimes on amazon and my local sub post office is 3 minutes away. So it makes sense me taking the mail there instead of dragging them on the bus and doing them at work. The postmaster at my sub-post office is the most boring, moaning person you could ever meet. Everything is too much trouble for him. I used to pay for all my postage at the post office, but every time I turned up with 3 or 4 packages you could hear him groan. Even when there was no queue and he was just sat there it was like it was too much trouble for him to process the mail.

I wrote the letter size and the weight on the back of each package, to save time. I'd go in and say, 1st class large letter 170g.

He world insist on weighting them and testing the size regardless. I had a bit of a row with him once because he insisted I needed a customs label on a small packet to France. I told him you didn't because it's within Europe... he said he knows best because he's been working in a post office for 5 years. I've never told him I work in a post office and deal with a heck of a lot more mail then him and any mail going to Europe doesn't need a customs label --- apart from mail going to the channel islands.

So I'm not surprised local sub-post offices are shutting down if the owners are as bad as my local.

Now I print all my postage online and pop them in the mail box and hardly ever have to enter a post office (apart from work).

fuzzgun19

money-4-nothing wrote: »

Now I print all my postage online and pop them in the mail box and hardly ever have to enter a post office (apart from work).

What happens if something goes missing?
Do you still get proof of postage online?

pinkgem

fuzzgun19 wrote: »

What happens if something goes missing?
Do you still get proof of postage online?

you need to get your proof of posting date stamped in a post office for it to be valid