Stamps.com Review

About Stamps.com
Stamps.com is a service that allows you to print postage from home for a fee. Their standard service is quite useful for people who send large volumes of mail. In fact, when I was liquidating half of our last house and library of books through eBay and Half.com, I used the standard mail service at stamps.com and was pretty pleased with the experience.

The photo stamps are an additional Stamps.com service, available at http://photo.stamps.com or via a link from their main site. With this service, you can upload your own photo or choose available PhotoStamps logos (for collegiate and NFL football teams, or NASCAR). Then you simply purchase a sheet of personalized, self-adhesive postage stamps with your chosen image on them.

Using the Photo Stamp Service
The photo stamps service is very simple to use and the site is easy to navigate. Creating a login is easy and you just click on the "Create Photostamps" link to browse to an image on your PC or to choose a team logo. Once your image is uploaded, you can center it, rotate it or change the border color around it.

Because the stamps are so small, you don't need a high resolution image. Images that can be cropped into a square are the most suitable for these stamps.

Once your image is uploaded and centered, you can choose from a selection of different postage amounts, and request as many sheets (20 stamps each) as you would like. Then you click "Next" and are taken to your cart. From your cart, you can either check out, or create and order a new set of stamps.

Pricing
My biggest problem with Stamps.com is that the stamps themselves are incredibly expensive. A sheet of twenty 39 cent stamps costs $17.99. If you purchase multiple sheets, the additional ones are two dollars less. But still, $17.99 for twenty stamps puts an exorbitant fifty cent premium on each and every stamp, above and beyond the stamp's 39 cent face value.

Checkout, Processing and Delivery
Once you've checked out, be prepared to wait for awhile for your image to be approved. The site advertises a 3-5 business day time for processing, though you can expedite that for an additional fee. Stamps.com doesn't allow pornographic or indecent images, so they seem to manually review each order before moving forward with printing it. The process took the full 5 business days (and two weekend days) after I placed my order, and as I waited for that week, I grew more and more nervous about not getting my stamps in time to mail out my holiday cards.

Finally the order was completely processed and I was notified that my stamps had been mailed out via USPS! I was very excited. Once mailed, the stamps arrived quickly, within two days.

Stamp Quality
The stamps look great, and they're big enough for the image to look good, but not so big as to dwarf the envelopes of our holiday cards. They peel off easily and adhere readily. I must admit, it's really cool to have a picture of my kitties snuggling up on the corner of each envelope, but it's an extravagance that I won't pay for often. Probably just once a holiday season.

If you don't like your stamps, Stamps.com offers  a 30 day satisfaction guarantee. You can return your order (presumably intact) within thirty days and they'll refund your money.

Cat's Bottom Line
I definitely like the end result of the photo stamps I ordered from Stamps.com, but I didn't like the long wait time for "processing" my order, and I think the price is a little too high. I can see why they have to put a premium on these custom stamps, but I found it unreasonable that the premium actually cost more than the face value of the stamp itself.

If you're not one for sending out photo holiday cards, then this is a great way to get a cute picture on your correspondence. I recommend Stamps.com's photo stamp service with the only caveat that you should be prepared to pay the exorbitant price, and to wait a little while.

Stamps.com: http://www.stamps.com