How to Ship Anything

When we started selling the Aardvark DVDs on our website, we didn’t think it would be so hard to pack and ship them. First of all, we didn’t expect there would be so many, and we conveniently forgot some of the little problems like filling out customs forms which turned out to be big nightmares.

For the first batch that we shipped we did things in a very ad-hoc way. I used Microsoft Word’s Mail Merge feature to print many of the labels; for international orders I wrote a little Access application that filled out forms on the USPS web site, and so on.

The actual shipping turned out to be quite difficult. It was amazing how small ergonomic problems turn into huge headaches when you’re shipping thousands of orders to 60 different countries. For example, the customs form generated by the USPS web site needed to be signed. We had tons of these. We tried to “sign” them by running them through the laser printer again and printing a couple of signature images in the correct place. This worked OK on one printer, but every other printer in the office jammed up when you gave it paper that had already come out of a laser printer. Why is that? Eventually, of course, the printer which could print signatures ran out of toner. It was a Dell. Dell doesn’t let office products stores sell their toner. The only way to get toner was to order it from Dell and pay a lot of money for overnight delivery.



Here’s what the physical system looks like.



Why Microsoft Access? I was skeptical myself. I’ve never, ever used the Access “report” feature in my life; I always imagined it was intended for old-fashioned people who need to have their data printed out for some obscure reason and can’t fathom the idea of looking things up on a computer.


Two other things you’ll notice about our packing slips, learned from hard experience. First of all, instead of printing them on a standard-sized sheet of paper, I printed them on 5×8 cards. This has two big advantages. First, they fit into the envelopes we use for shipping most books, CD-ROMs, and DVDs without folding. This really makes a difference when you have a lot of shipping to do. Second, because the card stock is a little bit stiffer than paper, it’s easier to shove them into the envelope.


When you’re ready to start shipping you grab a packing slip and scan it.





The second thing that happens when you scan the barcode is that it displays the information from the packing slip on a second large screen in a giant font. That way you can immediately shove the packing slip into the envelope… you don’t have to keep it around any more just to keep track of what you’re packing. This was a lesson learned from the first round of shipping, where we had to keep the packing slip outside the envelope until the last minute so that we would know what to pack and what the shipping method was; keeping the packing slip out until the last minute was just one more annoying thing that made the whole process less fluid.


To print USPS mailing labels with postage, you really only have three choices. You can use the USPS website (“Click ‘n’ Ship”), but that is designed for home users shipping one or two items. It is not designed to be automated and it always prints lots of instructions which you throw away. Since it relies on Adobe Acrobat Reader for the label, the process of printing is cumbersome and doesn’t work well unless you use expensive, full page 8.5 x 11 labels from a laser printer. Anyway, Click ‘n’ Ship is not the way to go.




Now… let’s talk about spitting out a label. If you’re doing more than three or four labels a day, you’ll want a label printer, and if you want the whole process to go quickly, you’ll want a really fast label printer, not a laser printer that has to warm up. Everybody recommended Zebra which makes high-end, industrial strength label printers. We went with the Z4Mplus, which spits out a 4×6 label in less than a second. Not only that, it peels the label for you if you get the optional peeler (sign me UP!) This thing is really, really cool. And if you get Direct Thermal labels, you don’t need to buy a ribbon or ink or toner or anything… it sort of burns the print onto the label.



The first trick was to find a printer that could print on 4″ x 7″ paper, the size of the customs forms, without messing up the sticky label part. It also had to be able to print pretty close to the edge of the page, it couldn’t depend on manually feeding each form, and it had to look good enough so that an image of the signature wouldn’t look too fake. It had to be fast at printing and not take a long time warming up, or it would slow down the process.

The printer we found which met all these criteria was the HP LaserJet 2420. We bought two of them (the other one prints the packing cards). It can hold about 100 blank forms in the envelope tray… it turned out that these forms are almost exactly the size of Monarch envelopes which is a standard format for most programs.

The setup software that comes with this printer is completely awful and crashed trying to install on a brand new Windows XP computer. It took several hours of fooling around with the drivers before this thing would print properly. In the meantime, it was printing, but super-slowly, and we couldn’t figure out why. I’m pretty shocked that in this day and age HP is still shipping printers that just can’t be set up by normal humans.



And, tada! You’re done.

Shipping an international order now takes about 35 seconds, down from 3 minutes, and can be done by anyone, whether or not they have SQL and Mail Merge skills. Domestic orders are even faster since they don’t need customs forms. Most of all, it’s all really fun.

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