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Go To Great Panes, Kathryn Maloney ©2012
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| For a long time I used the USPS Shipping Calculator to check shipping prices, but there is a more efficient way to see what your shipping will cost–the USPS Shipping Rate Charts–even more so now that USPS redesigned the calculator to hide all but the highest priced services unless you know how to make it show the rest of the options. You can see the USPS Shipping Rate Charts on these pages: The basic text pages–these are easier for me to read: The fancy pages–you need to click the name of the service on the left side of the Shipping Charts page to check prices in a chart layout–both domestic & international, plus extra services (otherwise it sends you to the shipping calculator):
If you are printing your labels with postage through an online service or using the USPS Shipping Assistant with postage stamps to cover the cost (see here for help with labels: Shipping Basics), you get a discount. Labels with postage through online services like Paypal get “Commercial Base Prices” for USPS shipments which are better than the retail chart rates you’ll see if you click the “USPS Shipping Rate Charts” link above, plus they get free Delivery Confirmation. Labels printed using the downloadable USPS Shipping Assistant using stamps for postage get the regular retail rates for postage but you still get Delivery Confirmation free. (Updated for 01/12 rates) ~~~ Click images for a larger view–opens in a new tab or window ~~~
*DC = Delivery Confirmation, 85 cents when purchased at the retail level.
 You can also confirm those rates–as you should all info you get from unofficial sources–in this PDF download from USPS: |
| Need more help? Check out the Shipping Basics page, also linked to from the right sidebar of every page in gold letters. |
Go To Great Panes, Kathryn Maloney ©2012
This post is copyrighted–you do not have permission to repost this content elsewhere but you are welcome to link to it if you’d like to share the information.
2 Comments | Add your own
I just looked into the shipping assistant and didn’t get the commercial based price fee instead it marked it as a retail price. and charged me 3.41 plus the 19cts. I don’t know what’s going on.
Have you tried the Click-N-Save labels on the USPS site?
I’ve not tried it and wanted to know if you knew about it and if you had what was your assessment on it.
Hi EvokeJay–sorry about that! I had just found that myself a few days before you commented. It is retail rates on the actual postage but you get discounted Delivery Confirmation with the Shipping Assistant (it’s now free even on First Class–when you printed your label it was discounted from 85 cents down to 19 cents).
I’ve used Click n Ship–it’s a great service but it doesn’t offer First Class for domestic packages so we usually just use Paypal labels (see link for using them whether or not you’ve had a transaction attached to what you are shipping).
There are the new-ish Priority Mail “Regional” Flat Rate boxes that are a great deal that aren’t currently available anywhere but Click N Ship. They can be a real savings if you ship small-ish heavy goods long distances. Hopefully a blog post about those coming up soon.
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