Look no further :) Check out Easy Shipper on the Mac App Store.
This past fall, I discovered EasyPost when Alex Hardin posted a link to an app called Shipper that he had developed for Windows users. Having shipped thousands of packages over the past 10 years, I’ve often found myself looking for a better option to quote, buy and print shipping labels. As a developer, on occasion, I would start investigating the APIs available from shipment companies like the US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx, but found that integrating with them would not be easy. (I know, a government agency and big corporations not making things easy? Weird.) Most also required that you get approved as a shipping vendor with them - ruling out the small guys.
In comes EasyPost to the rescue! Launched in 2012, they built a really nice API for developers to program against to buy and print shipping labels across many differnt carriers.
Armed with EasyPost’s API, I set about creating a Mac app to use for my every day shipment processing to replace what I was currently using, Endicia’s Mac app. Endicia charges a monthly fee of $14.95 that I didn’t want to pay if there was a way to avoid it. EasyPost charges a fixed per label fee of $0.05. Depending on monthly shipment volume, that could be higher than $14.95, but one caveat was that EasyPost offers US Postal Service Commercial Plus pricing which is cheaper than what Endicia offers. So for my case, even with a higher volume, EasyPost would be more economical. It also allowed me to print UPS and FedEx labels right in the same app as well.
This was a fun project. After finishing a version for myself, I refined it for the App Store and launched. I integrated printing the labels with the Zebra 2844 thermal label printer. It was pretty exciting when my app connected to the thermal printer for the first time and out popped a shipping label! :) Fun stuff for those of us that mostly move bits around…. to actually generate tangible output that popped out of a printer. Cool.
If you print labels from your Mac, check it out on the Mac App Store and let me know what you think :)
Easy Shipper enables Mac users to quote, buy and print shipping labels. It uses the EasyPost API and requires an EasyPost account.
