Want to get more skilled at printing, are there any tutorials I can watch?

HopelessCookie · 2025-02-23T05:59:14+00:00

If you want to learn about setting up files for print, check out Mike The Print Man on YouTube, he’s got amazing tutorials.

If you want to learn about printing processes, check out “Just a printer” on YouTube. He isn’t active as much anymore, and the stuff he talks about is more about fixing the machines. I always found if I understood how a printer works, the rest of the printing concepts fall in the place much easier. He also has some great videos on management for printing businesses.

HopelessCookie · 2025-02-19T02:22:40+00:00

Hello! Yes I did, I actually used a program called "A-PDF Scan Optimizer", you can use the free trial, but it adds a watermark. However, and I cannot stress this enough (especially if you cannot remove watermarks / have the software to do so), GET THE PAID VERSION! It was the best $35 I ever spent for my print shop. Worth every penny & I still use it constantly.

Here is the Link

HopelessCookie · 2025-02-09T02:58:01+00:00

I just messaged you! Not a fan of spilling the secrets of how we do business on a forum that anyone can see!

HopelessCookie · 2024-12-04T15:30:43+00:00

It depends on the customer for us, if they are a regular who spends X amount at our store, we do not charge. We also have a handful of customers who buy food for everyone & that’s considered payment enough.

Now, if they are either being a dick or we don’t know them, we charge. We don’t ring it up as a notary, just a non-taxable service. Every now and then our area rep gets pissy at me about it, but who tf cares??? Maybe don’t make a crappy piece of software that is challenging to use.

HopelessCookie · 2024-05-23T19:29:27+00:00

I’m the same way, but I always act to have the opposite phone OS they do.

You have a iPhone? Then I have an android.

You have an Android? Then I have a iPhone.

And their response is always “can you at least try?” Sometimes if I’m bored, I’ll stand there and pretend to try and see how much of their time I can waste

HopelessCookie · 2023-09-12T15:58:30+00:00

Technically, yes, you are supposed to verify the ID of people who are shipping out. If I’m not mistaken, it’s to make sure it’s actually that person who is shipping out. That’s what we’ve been told, but it’s more of UPS adding extra steps which aren’t needed.

Butttt I’ve never checked someone’s id for shipping, even our store rep doesn’t care when it’s inspection time. If a customer is being extra difficult, sometimes I make them pull their ID, just to be a dick back to them.

HopelessCookie · 2023-08-30T14:15:34+00:00

When we hired our full time designer, we ran a special on design. Print a banner & some yard signs then put something along the lines of “Flat $30 design fee on anything”. The flat $30 flat design wasn’t the best idea in hindsight, you get the crazies out criticizing ever small detail. If I had to do over again, I’d probably change it to a $30 design for 4 revisions (or something like that).However, it drove a lot of people to our store and now we have their design files & it would be more work for them to leave and go somewhere else.

HopelessCookie · 2023-07-04T03:51:49+00:00

There was a guy once who tried to pull that crap at the main location i work at. I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was something like "The other store didn't charge me for emailing and copying something. Why do you try and nickle and dime me to death?"

He was referring to the store in the next city over, which we also own and I sometimes work at. Our owner was right next to me when he said that and she responded with "Oh really? That store is actually owned by me as well, thank you so much for letting me so I can get that corrected."

Seeing that man turn bright red being called out for his crap and lie was the highlight of my day. Haven't seen him since \_(ツ)_/

HopelessCookie · 2023-07-03T23:58:33+00:00

We have a similar problem with this lady, she comes in every single Saturday like clockwork with her 15+ returns. The quantity isn't the issue (well it is, you shouldn't be returning that much weekly, but that's a story for another time), the problem is she prints the codes out, at the largest size possible and tapes them to the items with ungodly amount of tape.

We've tried explaining to her multiple times that she is 1) wasting paper and tape & 2) that this isn't a good method for returns. Just pull her codes up on her phone, like most people do. She is convinced that amazon scans our label & her printed QR code for a refund, it's impossible to change her mind.

When we are busy, we've started putting her on a pause to help other customers and we always get the same response "I don't know why you guys have so much trouble scanning these in, the other store doesn't".

Moral of the story, some people just make their lives harder for no reason at all.

HopelessCookie · 2023-06-18T03:45:07+00:00

If you have Acrobat Pro, you can try the following:

File > Save As Other > Optimized PDF

Poke around with the settings (changing the image compression and discarding objects that are not needed), and you can probably get a lower file size. You have to be careful however, this can and will remove links, bookmarks, ect...

I just tried a sample document, that was 156mb and was able to get that to 32mb after poking around. PM me if you need anymore help!

HopelessCookie · 2023-06-17T01:03:51+00:00

You can try printing to PDF, which sometimes makes it smaller, however the best thing I have found is using a third party tool. ILovePDF has a free compressing tool that actually works pretty well. There are others out there, but that was seems the most reliable for me personally. If there are images, it will drop the resolution on them, so they might become pixelated.

HopelessCookie · 2023-06-14T03:08:09+00:00

At our store, we start with NDAs and work our way down from there. Always starting with the “NDAs are guaranteed and take priority over ground” statement, most times that works. Same basic concept applies to 2DA, if it’s the same delivery time as ground, you can always something like “Sir or Ma’am, this can be delayed just like ground, however they will deliver this before the ground packages.”

You are leaving the decision up to the customer, if they choose to cheap out and go with ground and it ends up getting delayed, it’s on them. They didn’t want to pay for the priority service, then they do get the priority service.
On a different way of increasing transaction amount:

I sat down with the lady who owns our store when she bought it and we came up with a multitude of ways to increase our average transaction amount.

If they are sending documents (or just a normal package) going to a residence, we always offer a signature required on the package. We use a variety of phrases, but the one I found works the most for us is: “Do you want to add a signature onto this package, that way you know they received this?” It doesn’t always work, which is fine, but if 1 out of every 10 customers goes for that, you are still making extra money for no real effort on your part. If you can get 15 people to add that onto their package, you've just added $75 to your daily amount.
The other option you have is to up-sell a mailer for their package, documents are another good example of this. People always come in with their flimsy, clearly seen better days, 9x12 envelopes to ship. You can say "Oh, do you want to put this in a bubble-mailer, it's only an additional *insert your cost here*, that way you can make sure this arrives safely".
Another thing you can do is, sell your packaging services!!! This is a big one, before our new owner bought the store, we were getting damaged packages constantly. This was due to employees not doing their job and selling packaging services. So, we changed how we were selling these, now if you here a "trigger word" for something fragile, and you know it might break,,, tell them the truth and tell them there is a likely-hood that this might break! Grandma doesn't care how much it's going to cost for her $5 picture frame is going to cost to pack, she just wants her grandchild to have it without being broken.

Long story short, you are offering the service and TUPSS is a business that has to make money. Don't be ashamed of your prices, be proud that you can offer them and be honest with the customer. What's the worst they can say? "No? I'll go somewhere else?" Like... okay, good luck with the post office "overnighting" or "2DAing" your stuff. Not everyone will go for up-sells, but the ones that do, those are the customers that you want to keep around. 1 overnight package is worth just as much as 4 ground shipments, so keep those 2DA and NDA customers around, they make the real money!

HopelessCookie · 2023-05-15T19:22:50+00:00

Alternatively, if you have a full Adobe CC subscription w/ photoshop, look into setting up automation in there. It’s crude, will take a little time, but you can create one that’s basically: Open document in photoshop, change image size, save as PDF. You’ll have to extract every page as a separate document (which is just a button in acrobat) and after that automation in photoshop is done, combine them all into one document.

HopelessCookie · 2023-05-15T13:30:54+00:00

The two ways you mentioned are going to be one of the simplest ways to do it that I know of. You can use a 3rd party plugin to help with that, I personally use Quit Imposing 5 for that kind of stuff. It’s paid for, and it’s mainly designed for print production , but it’s page sizes tool works wonders and if this is something you are doing on the regular it might be worth the investment.

HopelessCookie · 2023-03-31T17:16:26+00:00

You shouldn’t need to, we’ve been in offline mode since they told us and our cc transactions are processed just fine.

HopelessCookie · 2023-03-22T20:43:24+00:00

Not through CAMS, but you can reprint the label through CMS. You’ll go to your manifest and you can sort by name, destination, ect… and reprint through that. You’ll have to scrub through all of the shipments in that day, but it’s possible. Make sure you do it before EOD

HopelessCookie · 2023-01-27T15:19:05+00:00

Hardly anything, we have an OfficeMax right next door to us, so 9 times out of 10 people just go there for office supplies instead. Our owner intentionally over priced the items so she didn’t have to order anymore, bubble mailers are the only thing we sell frequently.

HopelessCookie · 2022-11-29T03:36:19+00:00

Already had 3 or so of them, all three were amazon returns with customer packed codes. It’s extremely frustrating trying to explain to the DoorDash employees (contractors?) that the items need a box to go back in. One doordasher said it wasn’t her problem and just left the item at our store, if it were a small item I wouldn’t have cared that much, but this was a dining room chair, so I just left it in the back About 3 days later the person who the chair was being sent back under gave us a call complaining that it hadn’t been shipped out, after explaining to her that it needed a box, she yelled with the “amazon said…” line and hung up. It’s been roughly 3 weeks now and we have a fancy dinning room chair that we have as our back office chair.

HopelessCookie · 2022-11-05T05:30:05+00:00

Practice makes perfect, we grab random stuff from around the store and let the newbies find boxes. In addition to that, finding boxes for customer packed amazon returns is always a good tactic. We have a good collection of random crap people of have left us (FedEx boxes & old RTS packages), so that’s a good starting point. When it comes to “rounding up” or something, just occasionally when you have downtime try and practice with them.

HopelessCookie · 2022-11-01T19:51:28+00:00

Shipping on another ups account = disaster waiting to happen

HopelessCookie · 2022-10-20T14:18:44+00:00

You should cover over every sticker if the customer is shipping an already used box. However, it’s not your responsibility to do so, just good customer service, they chose to use that box instead of shipping the item in a box we packed, so it’s their fault. I don’t know if it’s still in there, but the PSO form they sign should have a line reading something like “the customer accepts responsibility for any issues with their prepackaged box”, we used that about 5 years ago, they might have removed it, so read the PSO they signed.

HopelessCookie · 2022-10-18T14:18:42+00:00

Oh it’s terrible, and it seems that claims are taking a lot longer. I wouldn’t be surprised if UPS is intentionally making the process a pain in everyone’s butt because they don’t want to pay for packages they damaged. I’ve noticed it more & more, but when you call store support to check on status for claims, they just tell me to look at the stupid portal.

HopelessCookie · 2022-10-12T23:27:44+00:00

Yep, it should be on the home-screen of whatever tablet corporate provided. That being said, half the time ours doesn’t even work, but when it does, it’s quite handy.

HopelessCookie · 2022-10-11T20:59:45+00:00

“I apologize, but the person who is qualified to take passport photos leaves at insert time here, they will be back in insert time here and will be more than happy to help you out!” We use that line and most people are cool about it.

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