Steve's personal blog

After my other post talking about wishful improvements to SmartStamp, I realised I have one little “hack” that I should share.

If like me you sell your books (CD’s, DVD’s etc) in the evening after you’ve completed your day job printing a stamp only really gives you the option of sending the parcel the next day, where as if you use SmartStamp during the day (9-5 style) you can post the item that day or the next.

The simple work around for this is to print your stamps after midnight, I appreciate not everyone is a night owl like my self so maybe print them the next morning, but ideally don’t print them between getting home from work and midnight.

This gives you an extra day in which your stamp will be valid. Ideally we all want to post our parcels the next day so the buyer gets them as soon as possible, but on the odd occasion we don’t get to put them in the post that day, when this happens your stamp is invalid and you have to do a new one, and apply for a refund. By printing after midnight you get an extra bit of grace to get your parcel in the post.

Hopefully one day RM may update SmartStamp so you get an extra day after 6pm or so, but for now wait till midnight +1 min before stamping!.

Steve.

It came to my attention that a number of members have listed their items for sale and left the national postage as “Ask”. Whilst I have no objection to this the one thing it results in is a poor sell through rate.

When a buyer looks to buy a item they will either not buy the item if they have to ask the seller what the postage would be, or they will just go else where and buy the book, CD or DVD, possible after requesting to buy from the seller, never returning to actually pay for it when the postage price has been clarified.

If the seller does accept payment through PayPal the buyer is unable to immediately pay for the item as it isn’t possible to include postage.

I appreciate some sites have a fixed postage rate which helps avoid this situation, but BookSwap.ws, CDSwap.ws and DVDSwap.ws are intended to be more flexible to sellers and allow them to set a more appropriate rate if they wish, or to setup their own default rate.

With this in mind I have removed the option of setting "Ask" and "Not Available" postage amounts for national postage. All items currently listed with this will still be valid but when you come to edit them you will not be able to save the values until you correct the postage options.

Note that this is only for items that are listed for sale.

Please take the time to set up your preferences (MyAccount->Preferences) and set a default postage rate as this will help you when listing your stuff for sale.


Steve.