Internet Postage Saves Time and Shoe Leather

SUMMARY

Simply Postage PRO: Cheaper than a conventional postage meter. CON: Similar to existing devices, can't print addresses or envelopes. VALUE: Best for small businesses with significant postage expenses. $50 to lease plus $18 monthly fee (includes one free monthly download). Additional downloads $5. Neopost 877/397-8267 www.simplypostage.com

SUMMARY

Stamps.com PRO: Inexpensive, uses PC printer, verifies zip codes. CON: You must use built-in address book and strict USPS formatting. VALUE: Great for home or SOHO users who want convenient, professional-looking printed postage. $About 10 percent of purchase. Stamps.com 800/877-7678 www.stamps.com

Like books, CDs, airline tickets, and almost anything else money can buy, stamps for snail mail are going online. Under the U.S. Postal Service's loftily titled Information-Based Indicia Program, several vendors are introducing products and services that will let you buy postage over the Internet and print it directly onto your envelopes or labels using ordinary printers or special postage-meter-type devices. Postage bought over the Net promises to be cheaper and more convenient than conventional meters or regular stamps, though you can't use e-postage to send mail outside the United States yet. I tried out preproduction versions of two e-postage efforts.

Neopost's Simply Postage is a small postage meter that downloads postage from the Internet and prints it onto special labels. Postage appears in the form of the USPS's new indicia. These consist of a unique, two-dimensional bar code and information such as the amount of postage and the sender's meter ID number. A $50 starter kit gets you a lease on the device, which looks like a small label printer; a greeting card application; 10,000 pieces of clip art; a scale that hooks up to the device; and a $50 postage credit. (The greeting card software, clip art, and scale were not included with my preproduction unit.)

The device that I tested came with a serial port connection, but Neopost plans to offer a Universal Serial Bus cable by the time you read this. The software calculates the amount of postage required for different classes of mail based on the weight of the item, either entered by you or read from the scale. To print postage, you click a button--or if you prefer, you can detach the device from your PC and hit a hardware button to generate stickers for the same amount as the last sticker printed.

Desktop Postage Store

Unlike Simply Postage, Stamps.com requires no special hardware whatsoever: You simply download an application from the Stamps.com Web site, set up an account, and purchase postage. After that, you can print postage in the form of the indicia, along with addresses and the PostNet bar code needed by the post office for sorting, on envelopes or labels using your existing printer. You can even add a small graphic to give a big-office look to your small-office mail. Because your postage account is kept on the company's server, you must be online to print postage.

One benefit of the software is that it verifies the zip + 4 codes of new entries by checking them against the USPS's huge address database. In my tests importing my Act contact list, the software rejected addresses that didn't meet USPS formatting requirements, but the application then let me fix them. You can also look over logs of postage purchases and printing.

The service does have a few odd limitations. For example, while you can specify fonts and point sizes, everything is printed in capital letters. Also, you can mail only to names listed in the application's address book, which you create manually or by importing data from popular contact managers such as Symantec's Act 4.0 or Microsoft Outlook 98.

Besides the $50 for its kit, Simply Postage costs $18 a month, which includes one free download of postage purchased online at cost. The device stores up to $500 worth of postage, and additional downloads cost $5 each. Blank postage labels run $7 for 100 or $10 for 200. By comparison, monthly fees for traditional postage meters (which these days can download purchased postage via 800 numbers) run $28 and up.

Stamps.com, which hopes to launch in early spring, expects to collect a surcharge of about 10 percent for postage purchases, with no minimum purchase requirement. That's cheaper than my bank's surcharge for paper stamps bought at an ATM. For many small and midsize businesses, e-postage will be a welcome alternative to today's costlier, more time-consuming options.