We ship out a lot of cards for collectible card games, or promos for board games or many other stuffs that simply fit in an envelope or mailbox. Every day a small bulk of these things get stamped and mailed out.
Still we sometimes get a message from a recipient about having to pay extra for shipping when their order arrives. In this post I’ll explain our process for shipments and explain why the dues are usually the fault of your local post office.
So, throughout the day we usually get multiple orders for items that fit in the mailbox. We collect these and prepare them all in bulk at the end of the day. We collect all items, slip them in envelopes and put them on a stack. When all envelopes are prepared we take the stack to add postage.
Adding postage is a fairly straightforward process. We visit the PostNL website and go through all the individual pieces, weigh them and add the appropriate digital stamp to our cart. When we are done going through all the mail pieces, we check out our cart and get a list of the digital stamps from PostNL.
A digital stamp consists of a combination of letters and number divided in 3 or 4 rows of 3 characters. De number of rows is 4 for international shipments and 3 for national. The code gets written on the envelope at the exact spot you’d normally put a regular stamp.
These type of digital stamps are accepted world-wide, and are a valid form of payment for postage. Still, sometimes local post offices are not familiar with these new-fangled pieces of technology. It is at this point that you will receive a notice for paying extra shipping fees.
What to do when you receive mail from us, and your post-office wants to collect a fee for missing. First off, check the top-right of the envelope if there is a digital stamp code written. If there is, just simply refuse to pay the fee and explain what the code is. Your post-office should be able to verify that postage is indeed paid for.
If the code is missing, we probably did goof up 🙁 Shoot us a message and we’ll work it out with you… Chances of this happening are extremely low though 😉
