Today at the post office I learned several new things about mailing.
1. If you bring in 200 tubes to be mailed, make sure to sort the tubes first according to mail type. This wins you loads of goodwill from the employees who would really rather not deal with tubes at all. If you forget to sort ahead of time, staying to help sort also wins you goodwill.
2. Try to time your arrival with 200 tubes for a not-busy time of day like 8 am. The employees are much more willing to help when there is no line of people waiting.
3. The goodwill from postal employees means that when you make mistakes on allowable types of shipping, they are happy to help you correct them. Not only that, but they will then explain a bunch of information that while technically available online is nigh impossible to find or make sense of.
4. No package containing an invoice can be sent via media mail. The books can be sent media mail, but the invoice has to be sent separately. (This is the end of us using media mail as a shipping option because I use invoices to make sure that the right contents go into the right packages.)
5. Up to four pounds can be sent internationally via first class mail. This is cheaper than Priority Mail which I thought was the only option. I’d assumed that first class mail disallowed anything but letters. This is excellent news for customers abroad.
6. Up to a pound can be sent domestically via first class mail. This is good news for domestic print buyers.
7. Just because you’ve been shipping things for over a year doesn’t mean you actually understand what you are doing.
What if you don’t call it an “invoice” but a “packing slip”? Does that make a difference?
That’s interesting, because I receive things media mail all the time with invoices in them. (As in, every single time I buy something used on Amazon, which is very very often.) Glad I’m not the one on the illegal and of that, and very glad that my shippers don’t know better, so I get lower rates. 🙂
Whoever told you that is incorrect:
Invoice
An invoice, whether it also serves as a bill, may be placed either inside a Media Mail piece or in an envelope marked “Invoice Enclosed” and attached to the outside of the piece if the invoice relates solely to the matter with which it is mailed. The invoice may show this information:
a. Names and addresses of the sender and addressee.
b. Names and quantities of the articles enclosed, descriptions of each (e.g., price, tax, style, stock number, size, and quality, and, if defective, nature of defects).
c. Order or file number, date of order, date and manner of shipment, shipping weight, postage paid, and initials or name of packer or checker.
The PO people are *wrong* about the invoice not being allowed. It’s allowed all the time. Someone beat me to the link in the USPS docs that specify just what an invoice can and can’t say. What the regs don’t want to see is invoices that are in actuality long complex statements of account, or newsletters in disguise, don’t apply to this specific shipment, or so on.
Companies pay people like me a lot of money to write the software that produces the invoices that go inside their Media Mail shipments. I don’t think they’d be willing to fund development of stuff that would just get their media rates yanked!
Also, the USPS person telling you this may have gotten Media Mail mixed up with the Bulk Mail regulations. Bulk Mail does have some pretty draconian restrictions on how much each individual item can be customized aka personalized. Bulk Mail basically wants everything to be identical except for the destination, and at times it seems a bit … nebulous … where the line is between “you have to have the member ID on the label in case there’s a problem” and “how much information and meaning and coding can we cram into a single line of text at the top of the label? What if we go to a sheet of paper inside the plastic carrier?”
Aw. Just when I was feeling I was cheating the system. *sigh*
Ack, now I’m kicking myself. I actually started to write out a comment about first class international a while back when you or Howard were worrying about shipping costs, then figured you knew and wanted to do it via Priority International so you could have tracking. I’m so sorry I didn’t speak up earlier. 🙁
*taking notes*
I like it when other people do the hard work first!
Thanks for the info. It sounded ludicrous for invoices not to be allowed.
It is possible that he was mixed up between Bulk Mail and Media Mail. However our posters don’t qualify even without the invoices and he was absolutely right to call me on that one. Thanks for the insights.
Don’t worry about it. The automatic tracking and insurance on Priority Mail are really nice features. At first we were using those flat rate envelopes which tend to be cheaper than First Class Mail. Unfortunately the flat rate mailers are flimsy and we were losing money re-shipping damaged books, so we had to discontinue them. I’m just glad to find a less expensive option that still allows me to use boxes.
Anything else you want researched while I’m working? 😉