Postal Scales
 

I finally got tired of running down to the post office every time I needed to ship, so I decided to buy a postal scale. I ended up ordering USPS 10lb digital scale. Hopefully it will be accurate enough for 1-2 oz range and will last. I tried a number at the local office supply store and found most of them to be in accurate.

Reading reviews on Amazon doesn't inspire confidence. Many complaints about accuracy and longevity (stop working after 6 months). I'm curious about other people's opinions who self ship for their business. In my case, its primarily for DVDs and an occasional ebay item or gift to family member.

I too got tired of going to the post office all the time to send out dvds or samples. I'm using stamps.com, I also tried Pitney Bowes but wasn't happy.

Stamps.com gave away a free scale if you signed up, I'm not sure if that offer still exists. You can plug the scale into your computer; printing your own professional shipping labels was a breeze. Cost for subscribing was around $15 per month.

The only thing I didn't like was doing international orders. For that I had to print out the customs forms, but still had to go to the post office to get them stamped for approval.

I don't mail enough to justify monthly fee of stamps.com. A friend told me about pay pal. you can print and pay for usps shipping without monthly fee plus you can get delivery confirmation for just 17c more. I'm not sure if the work flow is a smooth as stamps.com but I'm going to give it a try.

I got two free scales from Stamps.com about 10 years ago. One died after a year, and the other one is still going strong. Similar electronic scales are only $30 or so at Wal-Mart. I've never had the postman complain, so it must be somewhat accurate.

When I saw the accuracy comments on Amazon I thought they must be picky. But sure enough today I go into Office Depot and Bed Bath Beyond and a number of their display models were off by a ounce or more. I put a 2 oz candy bar and it reads 3.5 oz . The food scales in addition to being in accurate would keep changing wouldn't settle on a number. I also thought the more expensive ones would be more accurate but that wasn't the case either.

Most (probably all?) electronic scales have a function to allow calibrating the scale. In a previous job I did a lot of programming work integrating to electronic scales (much larger than a postal scale) so I learned it's a bit unrealistic to expect a cheap scale to be accurate right out of the box. I would expect the display models to be the absolute worst for accuracy, since people play with them all day.

Even my el-cheapo free Stamps.com scale has a calibration process.

I bought an electronic scale at Staples years ago. A Royal. Calibrated and it's very accurate. I've check my weights vs the post office and it's to within a 1/10 of an ounce.

The pain about scales is that since USPS redefined size vs rate, the weight alone isn't enough. You have to start measuring height, width, thickness of everything you mail.

Even the post office can't get consistent with that. I can bring in DVDs packed the same way day after day and get a different price because the size measurement are NOT accurate at all at the USPS.

You're so right about USPS. I once mailed a bunch of dvds that were weighed and priced by the Post Office. They get sent back "insufficient postage" they then tell me they were priced the wrong way by the other office. lol. The whole square issue they've gone back an forth on. A colleague showed me a trick he puts dvds in regular greetings card envelopes with 44c postage, for samples, demos, or proofs.