Am I using An Post correctly or is there anything I can change?

witnessmenow

Hey All,

I'm selling some products I design online. Not huge quantities or anything, but its ticking over (125 sales since September and I'm hoping to keep growing that) Some weeks I might have 10 orders, others weeks I might have none, so its pretty inconsistent that way.

I currently ship everything as a Large envelope <100g. The weight of single items including envelope varies between 20g-50g, sometimes if a customer orders several of something it moves into the Large envelope<250g price range.

I am currently just using standard rates. I buy the stamps ahead of time so that I do not need to go to the post office every time. (€2.90 covers everywhere in the world other than Ireland, was €2.80 up to two weeks ago). I get the Aviation Security Declarations (EU) and CN22 stickers from the post office, they are usually ok at giving them out if they have large numbers of them

I am finding the An post website incredibly difficult to navigate so I was wondering if people could answer a few of my questions:

• For the quantities I'm dealing with (~300 items a year), am I posting these the right way/ am I on the best rate I can be?
• I guess this is based on the above, but is there any way to not show how much postage cost to the customer? (A customer complained about the difference a few weeks ago, its a complicated story to why there is a difference, but I also don't think the customer needs to know the price anyways. It's clearly stated as standard post so its not like im saying your getting registered and your not)
• Can I print the Aviation Security Declaration as part of my address label? It would be nice to have one less thing to fill out or keep stock of
• Same as above for the CN22. I know anything I get from China has it integrated to the label, is there any specific guidelines around doing this?

Thanks in advance!

Victor

witnessmenow wrote: »

[*]For the quantities I'm dealing with (~300 items a year), am I posting these the right way/ am I on the best rate I can be?

You could get a franking machine that might offer a small discount.

'N', 'E' and 'W' stamps conceal the price, but aren't always available and you would need to use multiples of them for larger envelopes.

witnessmenow

Victor wrote: »

You could get a franking machine that might offer a small discount.

'N', 'E' and 'W' stamps conceal the price, but aren't always available and you would need to use multiples of them for larger envelopes.

How do they work actually? I have some N here on a roll from our wedding invites but I thought I could only use them as a national letter. Can they be used as their value (N being a €1 I guess) for other postage?

Victor

witnessmenow wrote: »

Can they be used as their value (N being a €1 I guess) for other postage?

As I understand it, yes.