Category Archives: Industry News

USPS April 2016 Price Change

Business Mail

USPS Announces Rate Change for April 2016

New prices are now available on the USPS website to take effect in April 2016. Before you panic, this is actually great news. The USPS has appealed to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), but most likely it will go into effect.

A little history. Back in 2013, part of the rate increase was a 4.3% “exigent” (emergency) rate increase. This was to help the USPS deal with the unusual circumstances caused by the Great Recession. The PRC agreed to the increase, but only allowed it to be temporary and based on reaching certain revenue goals. Unless the USPS can convince the PRC otherwise, this exigent increase will be allowed to expire when those revenue goals are met. This is forecast to happen in mid-April.

This rate decrease will effect “market dominant” products, which include First Class, Standard Mail, Bound Printed Matter, Periodicals, etc. It will not effect “market competitive” products like Priority Mail and Parcel Post.

ShipSYS Public Release

ShipSYS Shipping System for Books

ShipSYS Shipping System Released to the Public

The ShipSYS shipping and inventory control system has been in production since 2014. Previously, this was only available as part of a custom programming project. However, we have now created a more packaged system that is suitable for general release.

ShipSYS allows for the importing of order data from Amazon, eBay, Half.com and Zencart. It can also be easily extended to import from other systems. It prints packing slips, shipping labels and can assist in inventory management. After shipping, tracking data can be uploaded back to the selling site. It is integrated into our Remote Bound Printed Matter Mail Manifesting solution. As such, it is primarily designed for businesses that sell books, but can be utilized by anyone.

The system is also growth ready. It ships as a pre-packaged file and database server, providing multi-user access right out of the box. You may not need more than one shipping station to start, but you can add as many as you want without extra licensing fees.

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