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Friday November 27 4:41 PM ET
LIVEWIRE: Post office coming to you, courtesy of the Net
By Michelle V. Rafter
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- Nobody likes to schlep to the post office just to buy stamps. If a few enterprising companies pull through, soon the post office will come to you.
Starting early next year, consumers will be able to log onto the Internet and buy electronic stamps they can store online or in a small device attached to their PC and use just like old-fashioned lick-and-stick stamps. Electronic postage, which is approved by the U.S. Postal Service, can be printed out on all envelope types using any kind of inkjet or laser printer.
Eventually, e-postage could be incorporated into popular word-processing programs and other common software, and be offered as extras by Internet service providers and popular Web sites.
Since the beginning of the year, four companies have received go-aheads from the U.S. Post Office to begin testing their respective versions of electronic postage. Two, E-Stamp (http://www.estamp.com) and Stampmaster (http://www.stampmaster.com) -- which is changing its name to Stamps.com -- are each testing digital postage services with consumers in Washington and San Francisco.
Competition from long-time postal meter companies isn't far behind. Both Pitney Bowes (http://www.pitneybowes.com) and NeoPost (http://www.neopost.com), the No. 1 postage-meter companies in the United States and Europe, respectively, began their own beta tests this fall.
Companies' commercial launch dates have slipped a little since they were first announced, and industry observers now expect the first e-postage to be available by March or April.
All the electronic postage services being developed work more or less the same. Internet users will log onto a company's online postal store and download a small software application. The application will allow them to buy, using a credit card or checking account debit, postage in various increments and store it on the company's secure Web server.
E-Stamp also offers a hardware-based solution that allows users to store postage in a small device the company calls an ''electronic vault'' that attaches to a PC's parallel port.
For the convenience of buying stamps online, digital-postage companies will charge a transaction fee of 5 percent to 10 percent of the value of the stamps purchased. Some plan to offer volume discounts.
Digital stamp vendors are targeting as their first customers the legions of small companies and home-based businesses that traditionally haven't used postage meters, a population some analysts estimate spends $12 billion a year on stamps.
Analysts are already predicting a hit. Vernon Keenan, with Keenan Vision Inc. in San Francisco, expects spending on electronic postage will jump from $1 million this year to $127 million by 2000 and $1.9 billion five years later.
Early users of electronic postage love it. One is Marla McCormick, corporate administration director at Digital Access Corp., a 14-person software engineering firm in Woodbridge, Va.
Previously, McCormick sent a secretary to the post office once or twice a month to buy stamps and mail package. In between trips, she relied on more costly overnight services for urgent deliveries. After becoming an E-Stamp tester, McCormick found she's cut down on overnight deliveries, a move that will translate into dramatic cost savings once the test period ends and she begins paying for the service.
''When it comes to the point where I have to pay, I won't have a problem shelling out $200 (a month). It's such a time saver I'm thinking of getting one for my house,'' she said.
E-Stamp gained a giant advantage over its competition in mid-November when America Online Inc. (NYSE:AOL - news) tapped it to provide digital postage for an upcoming postal center the national online service expects to launch in early 1999. The four-year-old Palo Alto, Calif., company paid an undisclosed sum to partner with AOL, which is expected to offer its members discounts and other incentives to use the online postage service, E-Stamp officials said.
AOL isn't E-Stamp's only partner. Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ - news), which is also an investor in the private company, recently began shipping small-business computers loaded with E-Stamp software. AT&T Corp. (NYSE:T - news), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) and Francotyp-Postalia, a European postage-metering company, also are investors, though AT&T and Microsoft aren't integrating the product into their Internet services.
Stampmaster, which recently relocated its corporate headquarters to Santa Monica, Calif., to be nearer Southern California's nexus of Internet start-ups, is working on partnerships of its own. The company expects to announce deals with software publishers, Internet service providers and Web sites soon, some before the end of the year, according to Stampmaster President John Payne, speaking at a recent investment conference.
Think of it. By this time next year, people could go online to do their Christmas shopping, and their Christmas shipping as well.
(Michelle V. Rafter writes about cyberspace and technology from Los Angeles. Reach her at mvrafter(at)deltanet.com. Opinions expressed in this column are her own.)
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