Stamps and Postal Scales for Your E-Commerce Business

If you have ever taken a package to the post office without a prepaid shipping label, you’ve probably needed assistance from the clerk to pay for postage. Costs will greatly vary depending on what you’re mailing, the package size and weight, tracking options, delivery times, the contents of the package, and more. 

For the purpose of this post, I’ll be talking about standard-size letter mail as that is what I use for my business.

To mail anything, postal services such as USPS, UPS, or FedEx for example, will use a postal scale to determine how much it will cost the customer to ship their package. Transcell, a design and manufacturing company for measurement equipment, defines a postal scale as a highly sensitive scale that is used to weigh pieces of mail and packages in order to determine the most accurate postage rate. If your business regularly ships out products, a postal scale can save you time and money. 

In the beginning stages of opening up my business, I experienced both underpaying and overpaying on postage. Both are quite annoying experiences. On one hand, if you don’t pay for enough postage, you have to repackage the order, pay for more postage, and re-mail it out. This costs more time, more resources, and more money. Overpaying on postage might be a little easier to ensure there is enough postage on the package, but ultimately you’re wasting money. For a new and small business, this is a big no no.

Since I primarily mail out sticker orders, calculating the cost of postage is fairly simple. All my orders go out through USPS in a standard-size letter envelope.

If my letter envelope weighs 1 ounce or less, I just need one forever stamp. But if my letter envelop weighs anything over 1 ounce, then I must to pay for additional postage. This got me in the beginning a few times because an order would weigh 1.1 ounces and the distribution center would send it back. I didn’t realize additional ounce stamps were a thing.

The updated USPS postage prices as of July 2024 are reflected on the chart below.

You can also mix and match stamps. USPS has a variety of stamps available for purchase. If you need $1.57 in postage, you could even do 2 forever stamps + 1 $0.10 cent stamp + 1 $0.01 cent stamp. You can use any stamps as long as it totals the correct postage price.

This is also where you commonly see people overpaying for postage. If you only need $1.29 in postage and slap on 2 forever stamps instead, you're paying $1.46. That's $0.17 cents more than required! 

While overpaying less than a dollar on postage might not seem like much, it adds up. If you mail out 100 orders you could have wasted anywhere from $15 to $80 bucks on postage you didn’t even need depending on what stamps you’re using.

This is where a postal scale comes in handy. My orders generally weigh anywhere between 0.8 and 1.2 ounces so having the scale to know whether or not I need that additional ounce stamp is nice. 

If you purchase your shipping labels on a platform like Etsy, Shopify, or Pitney Bowes, having the correct ounce of your mailing will help their system accurately calculate your postage for you as well.

Knowing the exact postage amount can also help when setting product prices. Some business don’t charge for postage, some include general postage pricing in their listings, and others do charge for postage. Johnathan Lyman with the Seller Journal makes an excellent point about the rise of e-commerce businesses and customer’s expectation on fair pricing and accurate shipping costs. If you include the cost of shipping in your product’s price point, customers want the price to be fair and justifiable. If you charge for shipping, consider the postage cost, tracking, and standard vs rushed shipping fees. If it’s only going to cost you $5 to ship something, a customer might be turned away if you’re charging an unreasonable amount. 

When in doubt, just stop by your local post office and ask. When I was just starting out and got an occasional order returned due to not having enough postage, I took it to the clerk and asked if they could weigh it so I knew how much it would cost. 

There could also be other factors to consider. I mail out stickers, a thank you card, and a smaller envelop with some freebie stickers so it’s fairly flat. I was told as long as it’s bendable I was good to go. But if your letter envelope it stiff, ridged, lumpy, or oddly shaped depending on what you include inside, it may be subject to additional postage fees. 

Once I expand on the products I sell, I will have to navigate new shipping options and their costs. But for now, it’s pretty simple once you do your homework.

Sources

1. “Is a Postal Scale Right for Your Business?”, Transcell, (2021). https://www.transcell.com/insights/is-a-postal-scale-right-for-your-business/?srsltid=AfmBOooix5ZlqnD1qzVnLYfTPDfHeu\_Dh96SQnlmhw8EwxD7am6xWUs- 

2. Johnathan Lyman, “The Best Postal Scales in 2024 For Shipping Orders”, Seller Journal, (2024). https://sellerjournal.com/best/technology/best-postal-scales/#:~:text=And%20a%20postal%20scale%20is,you%20may%20overpay%20for%20shipping

3. “U.S. Postal Service Recommends New Prices for July 2024”, U.S. Postal Service, (2024). https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2024/0409-usps-recommends-new-prices-for-july-2024.htm