In this post, will be doing an extensive US Global Mail Review & how where we stand in comparison to other mail forwarding companies in the industry.
Let’s assume you are ready to move to another home or set to move abroad, and need a mail forwarding company to handle all incoming paper mail; what’s next?
Where do you even start your due diligence process and how do you pick among the countless companies that claim to offer this service? Is quality of service more important than cost? Is cost the only contributing factor? What about hidden fees and additional upsells that force an increase to your monthly mail forwarding bill?
That, and other points will be covered in great detail in this article. So read on!
Thinking About Privacy
When you think of a piece of mail, often times you may think of just the occasional letter you get from family members during the holidays, or the ton of junk mail of that pizza place you never intend eating at. But there are a few documents every person at some point in the year will receive, that can only come via the good ol’ postal service. IRS notices, state & federal papers (social security card, driver’s license etc,) are just scratching the surface of the type of items you can only accept via snail mail.
Which also raises the question & concern; how does my mail forwarding company handle security & privacy issues? There are 2 points to this concern actually, and rightly so:
- Mail theft & warehouse security
- Loss of mail and delayed delivery
The first one is pretty obvious; you don’t want anyone sniffing through your papers or getting the smallest glimpse at any personal information. When a piece of mail arrives at US Global Mail, it is delivered to a 24/7 surveillance monitored warehouse in Houston. There is one location the warehouse is located at, a management team of operations in a singular place working there every single day of the week and…as it was just mentioned; the property has intense security surveillance with numerous camera systems and even security personnel in place.
See, the issue of privacy is not something you need to handle lightly; most mail forwarding companies outsource their mail to other smaller local postal services. Their only determining factor of “who” handles your mail, is the price quoted by the lowest bidder. That practically means that your mail can be stored in Arizona this quarter, next quarter it could be some place in California, and then even some place Minnesota. The bottom line is, the screening process of these locations is very thin and they simply outsource all their mail to smaller local operators.
Our intention in this blog is not to throw mud at the face of any of our competitors, but rather to raise the issue and concern of security; mail theft is a rising problem in this country. If a mail forwarding company does not have the security of your mail as the first concern in mind, then how can you consider entrusting them with all your personal information in the coming months & years?
When a mail forwarding company has to pick between using 1 location to process mail, or several, it is evident that limiting itself to 1 location has direct effects to its bottom line and gross margins. We would love to offer 100+ locations as part of our virtual addresses but here are two reasons why we don’t and why you don’t want a company with that many locations:
- Outsourcing. No matter what industry you look at, whenever a company subcontracts the work to someone else, and especially when they don’t have a firm grip on operations, things get out of hand. That is because the primary purpose of outsourcing, is the distribution of the workload to another company that will do it for less (less skilled workers, poorer IT infrastructure, less motivated,) to squeeze out a margin.
- There’s no reason for it.
Whether your mail is sent to Alaska or Texas, does not practically matter one bit, given that it is all uploaded into the cloud and onto your virtual mailbox.
This raises the question: Why do companies offer multiple locations?
The short answer; marketing.
If you look at TV companies, they always speak of the thousands of channels they carry and how they have dedicated channels for some sport a village in east Europe came up with (or something in those lines.) The bottom line is, no one goes through 100 channels in a week (or even a month,) so there’s no real application for having thousands of channels in your plan.
Similarly, offering multiple address locations sounds reasonable: “If I’m from Boston, then I need to get a mail forwarding company that receives mail in Boston or at the very furthest; Massachusetts” one may say. But as stated earlier, it makes no difference whatsoever; it all is uploaded into the cloud.
You can be located in a tiny village west of Texas or live in an igloo in Alaska, all mail still ends up in the same place.
The Pricing Paradox
If you’ve been following the train of thought, by this point you are probably thinking: US Global Mail must be a very expensive service to be able to keep everything in house.
Not only that, but we are the lowest priced mail forwarding company in the industry! And even though some other companies at first glance seem to have cheaper monthly plans, in reality they have a series of hidden fees (or like they call them “add ons”.) And for the most part, these are mandatory parts of the service, without which you can’t really have efficient mail forwarding in place.
We spent the time in this blog, gathering all pricing information and the features that come with those plans, for the major mail forwarding companies in the space.
It’s pretty obvious; there’s no comparison and we blow all other services out of the water; both in terms of quality of service (all work is done in-house,) and in terms of pricing (lowest monthly plans.)
And if you’re wondering “how do they do it?” the answer is simply company size; we have been around since the 90’s and with 80,000+ customers under our belt. We have the bandwidth to offer a top notch mail forwarding service, at the fraction of the cost that you would pay elsewhere.
For any questions or if you’d like to reach us, you can do so here.
