Shipping Made simple

QuickView of UPS Mobile for iPhone

UPS recently released a free UPS Mobile application for the iPhone which provides a strong base feature set to users who are shipping or receiving packages. Unlike the FedEx Mobile solution, users are not required to create an account with the carrier, but it’s highly suggested so that you can take advantage of the full functionality.

Tracking
No doubt Tracking will be the primary use of this application. Creating an account allows you to see any of your shipments created on the ups.com website as well as any past shipments that were tracked.

For tracking shipments coming to you – we suggest using iPhones copy/past function on the track number from your notification email subject instead of the tracking link. (see below)

Shipping
We think the jury is still out on shipping from the iPhone, but integration with the ups.com address book will greatly simplify the need to create on-the-go shipping labels. While you can’t print from the phone, the shipping label is conveniently delivered as a PDF attachment in email which can be printed back at the desktop.

Drop Off Locator
One of the handiest features has got to be the drop off locator. It has the ability to find the closest drop off based on your current GPS location, or from a manually entered zip code. You can then narrow down your drop off selection by type. This will surely help for those times when you need some assistance boxing up your item, or finding a location that can accept your package that’s to large for a drop box.

Shipping Quote
Another handy tool is the Quick Quote. By entering in the origin and destination information along with the rate, you can quickly see time in transit or estimated cost.

Version 1.0
While we have a laundry list of features that we’d like to see added or enhanced, this truly is a very solid v1.0 release. As of this posting, the App store currently rates the app at 3.5 stars from just 279 ratings, however posted feedback is very complimentary. Based on the fact that FedEx Mobile for the iPhone has almost 13,000 customer ratings, it seems that there is a lot of customer demand for robust functionality from mobile devices. USPS is expected to release a iPhone application in the upcoming weeks, so the race is on!

Congratulations to the UPS mobile team!

Posted on November 9th, 2009 in Our Partners, Tools & Tips | 0 Comments

UPS iPhone app now in App Store

Just found the new official UPS iPhone app in our daily search… must have come out. Learn more on iTunes. We’ll have a look and report back later…

Posted on October 29th, 2009 in Miscellaneous, Tools & Tips | 0 Comments

USPS Mobile -or- 5 Things I Hate About m.usps.com

Last week the USPS announced that they are offering a mobile-optimized version of the most popular functions from the usps.com website. While some will appreciate this addition, the implementation of the iPhone specific version is a bit disappointing.

1. No good looking icon for my iPhone home screen! – when you add the web page to your home iPhone, it’s displayed with a generic icon, making it hard to locate amidst all my apps and links. It doesn’t take much effort to create a 57×57 icon named apple-touch-icon.png.

2. No way home! There is always link home at the bottom of the page, but I have to scroll. Make the header image link home please.

3. Bad Form Validation. If I error in form input, it has to reload a page, which is really annoying on a mobile device. Simple client side JavaScript can have been utilized to check for form requirements/errors quickly.

4. Not optimized for the iPhone! There are tons of templates out there, and it’s not hard to create your own. iui or another framework could have been utilized to provide a iPhone-like appearance. At least the address bar could be hidden to provide more screen real estate.

5. The locator function could utilize Geographic Location Classes.

Posted on October 29th, 2009 in Tools & Tips, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Eight Great Ideas from the PARCEL Forum

While NRG wasn’t exhibiting at the PARCEL Forum in Chicago last week, we did take a road trip to visit with some of our industry associates.

Mark Taylor, who facilitated the PARCEL Key Executive Forum, just released an article in PARCEL magazine which has eight great tips to reduce transportation costs. We especially like the tip about sending packages with “Hold For Pickup” instead of UPS Early AM as we know some NRGship customers are already doing this to cut costs! Check out our KnowledgeBase for more information on doing “Hold For Pickup” shipments.

Posted on October 14th, 2009 in Tools & Tips | 0 Comments

Stop ReKeying Ship Addresses- Use Enhanced Copy/Paste

For NRGship UPS Mac Pro and FileMaker users who have not integrated shipping, the software features enhanced copy/paste as a quick alternative to retyping or copying addresses line by line.

Easily paste a complete address from a web page, an email, your Ecommerce system or from another Mac application such as Quickbooks, MYOB, Lightspeed or Daylight.

Simply copy any address to your clipboard, create a new shipment and use the ⌘ 8 command and depending on the address format – it will populate all of your address fields as shown below:

Posted on July 2nd, 2009 in Tools & Tips, Uncategorized | 0 Comments