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If you follow me at all across social media, you will know I’ve gotten into making and selling stickers. I design them and then use my Cricut to cut them using print and cut.
It’s becoming a pretty good thing for me.
Anyways, in the sticker groups I’m seeing the same thing over and over in regard to tracking your orders without having to pay $3+ for such a light item.
So I am going to cover how I mail my stickers, how I get tracking with only paying normal stamp prices and my way does not involve misusing USPS tracking.
First, I use these Thank You cards that are 3.5″ x 5″ That is the smallest size item you can mail through the postal system. They are made of Kraft card stock and once you fold up your packing slip inside with your stickers all secure, everything arrives nice and safe.
Now if my order is on Etsy I use the Etsy postage option for letter mail. Here are the settings I use. The lowest postage cost covers up to 1 oz, once you pass the 1 oz mark you have to round up to 2 oz and pay that cost. It’s still minimal compared to paying for postage you don’t need to.
You pay for the postage, and it includes what is called an Intelligent Mail Barcode. You’ve seen them on your mail before. It’s the small barcode above or below your address on First Class Mail.
Now this tracking is a bit different from USPS tracking as it only gets scanned at the distribution plants as it goes through machines and again at the post offices but not by the carriers. So the Out for Delivery notifications and Delivered notifications are just estimates really.
If you start taking orders that are not on Etsy, here are some of your other options of Tracking.
Letter Track Pro is a service that provides the same tracking service, however they do not sell postage. The smallest cost of using them works out to 32 cents a letter. You get 50 tracking for $16.00. And then just buy sheets or rolls of postage from the post office.
Now these other 2 services are ones I have found that mention they offer First Class Letter Mail Postage but I have not tested them yet, but they are worth mentioning.
VIP Parcel – I do see you have to add funds to your account to use them, but they do not charge a monthly fee like some services. So what you add is used for buying postage. On their home page they have a rate calculator, and it does have an option there for First Class Letter, so I’m thinking that is an option.
Orange Mailer – This is another one where you load funds for postage. No monthly fees unless you choose to upgrade your account to a Plan that can do batch printing and other features. I signed up as Pay as You go. Again I’ve not tested these services yet, just signed up to see the back end.
And we can not end a post about mail tracking without mentioning the ever popular Pirate Ship, Pirate Ship is well known for being able to provide us small businesses with Postage tracking, but it’s more for Parcel use, they don’t offer a Letter tracking like the other above-mentioned services.
I hope this has been some helpful info, and Best of Luck to you in your Business.