[buymycards]

Hi Leon,
The PO now has a manifest service for ebay/paypal customers, and it applies to anyone who prints their own postage and labels. Let's say that I sell 20 items on ebay, then I print the labels and apply them to the packages. I can then print a manifest that lists each individual package and shows the total number of packages. The postal clerk then scans the barcode on the manifest, so there is only one scan made. When you go online to look up the tracking info it will show all 20 packages as accepted by the Post Office and which manifest these packages were attached to.

The problem is that the PO doesn't check each individual package to see if it actually matches the manifest. I might bring in 20 packages, but they may not be the same 20 packages that are manifested, so a lot of trust is involved with the customers bringing in the packages.

UPS and Fed EX handle their larger customers in the same manner. In fact, at most post offices, we receive dozens of parcels every day that originated with Fed Ex or UPS, and these companies drop them off at the Post Office for final delivery. These packages are all manifested, but we do provide them with individual arrival scans because in the past we had lots of problems with the packages that actually arrived not matching the manifest. I suspect we will get to a point with PayPal and Click and Ship customers where we will need to scan every package that is associated with a particular manifest but many of these customers come to the front window and there just isn't time to scan each individual package and still keep the lines moving. The other issue is that these business customers don't want to wait in line while we scan 30 or 50 parcels, so they provide the manifest instead.

Rick