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E-mail This StoryLittle Elm’s Zip It Postal and Auction Center has become only the fourth business in the country to offer a convenient new product for mailbox renters that can save them both time and money.
POPickup will alert customers, either by e-mail or text message, when and what kind of delivery has been sent to their P.O. box. Phone call notifications will also be available soon.
Jim Ulik rents a mailbox at Zip It for his business, ITR Consulting Group. He was the second customer to sign up for the service Sept. 20, the first day it was available in Little Elm.
“It’s going to save me a lot of time by basically saving a trip across town,” Ulik said. “Especially on Eldorado [Parkway], traffic is horrible.”
Jim Carrigan, president and CEO of POPickup producer PerSage Inc., got the idea as a mailbox renter. He grew tired of stopping by his mailbox multiple times a day only to find it empty.
“When you’re fairly anal about your time like I am, and with the cost of gasoline, I thought there’s got to be a better way of doing it,” Carrigan said.
Sure enough, POPickup made its first appearance two years later in Orange County, Calif., where Carrigan lives. Since the first installation in July, another retailer in Orange County, one in Phoenix, Ariz., and now the Little Elm location have made POPickup available to customers.
“There’s always pros and cons being the first, but I think this is something that’s going to be very successful,” Zip It co-owner Sandi Sabonis said.
During the development stage, Carrigan surveyed eight different marketplaces, hoping to get a positive response from 40 percent of responders. When 63 percent of those polled said they would use this service, he knew the need was greater than he expected.
For the most part, early POPickup customers have enjoyed the product.
“It takes customers a little bit of time to embrace it,” Carrigan said. “It’s a kind of thing where if you think about it a little bit you realize this is something that’s very useful.”
The system works through a 3-inch device that is placed along the top of a P.O. box. When something is placed in the box, the employee presses one of three buttons, which sends an alert that a package or letter has been received, or that the customer should visit the front desk at the store for further information.
Since all employees will be required to activate the system when a customer receives mail, box renters will no longer be frustrated by mixed messages about a phone call from the retailer if a different employee is on duty when an item is received.
“It won’t be a matter of who is on staff at the time, or if a new person who’s in training forgets to do what they’re supposed to do,” Sabonis said. “It will just become part of our work.”
Workers will also receive less phone calls from mailbox renters checking on deliveries, lessening their interruptions during the day and allowing them to focus on other tasks.
Zip It will be celebrating its one-year anniversary on Oct. 20, but Sabonis said that she has been looking for this kind of technology to give her store an edge since it opened.
“It’s just one of those things that is something that we wanted to do, and now PerSage has made it easy,” she said. “I think it’s going to help us be a competitive leader in the area.”
Carrigan said that his product will be a big help in saving space around Christmastime, as customers will know when they have a package and can pick it up right away.
Customers can sign up for POPickup for an introductory monthly rate of $5, and many believe it’s well worth it with the time, gas, and hassle they save.
“Having the ability to get that service ahead of time, I can schedule my day around coming here, not having to keep stopping back to see if anything has been delivered,” Ulik said.
