PO Box vs UPS Store vs Virtual Mailbox for Your Small Business

hey this is attorney eels with Potts Weinstein and today we're going to talk about should you get a PO Box a UPS Store box or a virtual mailbox service for the mailing address for your small business or online business if you're starting a small business especially a business that is online you may not be wanting to use your home address for your business either because you're not allowed to because you want privacy or maybe you're Nomad and you're traveling around so what kind of an address should you get now let's start with the pros and cons of a PO Box so a PO Box is that mailbox you can have at the post office oh post office so it is the cheapest way to get a mailing address the small little PO boxes are very very inexpensive now they're different prices depending upon what ZIP code it is and also obviously depending upon the size how PO Boxes work is it's you know total old school you have to go there in person to get a key you can sign up for it online usually but you have to go there in person to get a key and there's a literal key occasionally they have ones that have like a little code that you turn like little dials but you still have to go there in person to get that you have to go there in person to pick up your mail the post office will scan the front of your mail at least most of your mail so you can tell what mail is in that mailbox and you can set up your account that way by the way this is true even if you get mail an apartment or a house I have all my mail scans so I know what mail is coming they're not going to open the mail for you so that only helps you a little bit you have to go there in person to pick it up now generally speaking it's going to be a PO Box it'll be obvious as a PO Box while some mailboxes some post offices will actually give you a street address so you can get UPS FedEx all that stuff delivered there which is great it's still in a database of P.O boxes so anyone who's like part of a government agency can look up in that database that this is a PO Box so you can't use it as a physical location address usually because they can look that up and so Post Office boxes are wonderful if you're local so you can go to the PO box and pick up your mail they're really great if you need to keep things super cheap so let's go look at the next option which is a UPS Store mailbox and this is also something I've had I've had all three of these I've had PO boxes UPS Store mailboxes and I've had virtual mailboxes UPS Store is another kind of old school system where you go there in person to pick up your mail and you have a key now the one of the neat things about a UPS Store mailbox is that usually you have 24-hour access to your mailboxes post offices you might have 24 access you might not before the pandemic a lot of them you did after the panda like a lot of them you don't but even before that pandemic some of them you didn't at UPS Store usually not always usually you get actually a key to this area where the all the mailboxes are and you can go in and get your mail now you can't get your packages that way necessarily sometimes they'll have larger boxes and if you have a box that fits in one of those larger boxes they'll give you a key and then you can open that up to get your package but sometimes your package won't fit in that or they don't have any boxes like that so you have to go there during the day when they're there also if your mailbox fills up too much and this is true of a PO Box as well then you have to go there when they're open so they can give you the big pile of mail and they're probably going to be a little bit pissy about it UPS Store mailboxes I've found tend to be the highest price of all these three options but it very much depends upon location every UPS Store is gonna have different prices one really neat thing about a UPS store is that they can accept all kinds of stuff I've had flowers delivered and cookies delivered and Messenger Service things they can accept many many things at a UPS store that a post office box won't work for and a virtual mailbox won't work for they don't scan stuff or let you know what's there now sometimes you might be able to pay for something where they tell you if something has arrived but they're not opening up all your mail and scanning them so you can read them you also don't have to pay to pick extra to pick up your stuff and this is true of both a post office box as well as UPS dropbox since the whole thing is in person that's like the idea of it you going there in person to pick up your stuff doesn't cost anything extra you just have to go when it's open and you have access another thing that's great about UPS Stores is they have other things there right so you can ship things you can buy stamps obviously you can do at the post office but you can also they have notary services and they have a bunch of other business services there Printing and faxing which I occasionally still do have to fax things even in this day and age so if you need those other business services that can be a good option for you the third option which is what I currently use for all of my businesses is a virtual mailbox so what is a virtual mailbox service there's a number of different companies and I will be doing reviews of these companies as well such as anytime mailbox and Earth class mail and some other ones this I mean there's a huge list of them as well as services like ink file and things where you may use them for to form a corporation they also sometimes have a virtual mailbox service as an add-on how virtual mailbox service works is there's no in person usually when I say usually because I'll talk about in a minute there's usually no in person at all you have this address that that probably is a building somewhere where that address is where there's a mailbox for you but there's no like physical mailbox that someone can actually deliver stuff to it's all completely virtual they scan all of your mail they scan the outside and then you can tell them to open it up and scan the inside you can tell them which things you want them to shred recycle throw away and you can have them forward certain pieces of mail to you now how much it costs is just all over the place it's gonna be based on not the size of the box but how many male pieces you get per month and then if you go over that number then they charge you per piece of mail they may charge you for scanning they may not charge you for scanning or maybe it's unlimited scanning or only a certain amount per month they may charge you for shredding they may not charge you for shredding they may charge you also for the mail that they're holding so for example with one of the mail services I'm using right now when I get a piece of mail they scan the outside and then they're holding it and I get a certain amount of time that it doesn't cost me any additional money for them to hold that mail from me I can't remember how what it is it might be like a month you know something like that for uh envelopes but if I'm getting boxes it's much sooner and then I tell them whether or not I want them to open it and then they scan it if I tell them to do so if I want them to shred it throw it away or recycle it or I want them to forward it now there are some things I just have them scam because I don't have a privacy issue with it I just want to know what it is but there are some things that I just have them forward to me because I don't want them opening that piece of mail occasionally Services actually have check depositing things where they will open up the mail and deposit checks for you at your bank but I don't see those Services as much anymore and also I mean how many people are getting checks on mail right now if you get a box they typically will only hold that with no extra cost for a much shorter period of time sometimes it's 30 days but sometimes it's like five days and sometimes like one day it can be based on how big the box is because you think about it you gotta store all these boxes right and so if it's a huge giant box it might be a shorter amount of time one of the wonderful things about these virtual mailbox services is you don't have to ever go in person it's great you never need to go there in person they're going to scan all of your mail on the outside and then you can tell them if you want them to open it or forward it to you this is the best thing in my opinion about these Services they also in theory are the are the middle price where the UPS Store places are more and the PO box are less but it really depends on how much mail you get and how you're using it do you have them scan everything and open it up how often do you have them forward stuff to you because whenever you're doing that it costs more money for those additional things also if you do need to pick up something in person and they allow that they usually charge you for that so for example I'm planning to use a virtual mailbox service for my personal mail because I'm going to be traveling full-time and for the one that I probably am going to select I'm doing it using a service that actually does have a local aspect to it but they're going to charge me I think it's like a two dollars for me to go there and pick up stuff in person now the you get one per month where you don't have to pay the money but the issue is is like what if you order something off Etsy and you want that to be delivered now something from Amazon you can have it delivered to well those Amazon lockers but if you order something from Etsy or some small business or just somewhere else then and that doesn't have an in-person store that you can pick it up at like if you order something from Old Navy or whatever you can or Home Depot or Walmart you could pick it up at that store but if you order something that doesn't at a place that doesn't have a store or doesn't have a store around you you need it delivered somewhere and so a lot of these places will charge you sometimes I've seen five dollars to go there and pick up your box that's yours I personally find that super super annoying and ridiculous but that's just how these businesses work so virtual mailboxes and UPS Store mailboxes they may or may not look like a real address so you really have to look at the address itself so for example with virtual mailboxes I've seen them be like you know a number this street name a unit number and then another number that's your box well that's a really long address and it actually can be hard to get mail there sometimes it's too long for you to even type into a form and it doesn't look like a real address however there's other ones where it's just you know the number for the street number the street name and then it just has your unit unit number your suite number number that is your box so you really want to look at the exact address that you're getting to make sure it's a good fit another thing is you have to look at the specific virtual mailbox service to see if where their addresses make sense for you sometimes they only have addresses in the capital of that state in Sacramento California for example sometimes they only have addresses in one place it's in Oregon well and that's not helpful for you you're in California you don't want to look like you have an address in Oregon that's just adding weirdness you may want an address in your own City or in specific places maybe you want to address that's New York or San Francisco or La maybe you want something that is close to where your actual location is so you have to look at the addresses to see if they're good fit for you fundamentally with these different options there's no right answer it really depends on how you're going to use it if you need the most cheap thing and you're okay with picking up in person P.O box is the way to go if you need to be able to get more services in your okay with in person and you need to get boxes delivered and you do shipping and things like that a UPS store may make a lot of sense if you need it to be virtual completely online because you're traveling full-time because you need to want an address that is in some different city than where you actually are located then probably one of these virtual mailbox services is going to make sense as I've said I've used all three of these different options and now I go with the virtual mailbox services and that is because I don't want to have to go in person if I have to go in person I've never remember to go and I forget to pick up my mail but if I have a virtual mailbox service they send me an email letting me know that I have mail and I log in and I get my mail so it works the best for me personally I also don't get that much mail so going in person to pick up mail doesn't even make sense because I might get one piece of mail a week that's just not a very efficient way to do business that may not be true for you maybe you're getting a lot of mail maybe you send out a lot of mail in a UPS Store box or a PO Box is going to make more sense for you again this is attorney Elizabeth Weinstein if you have any questions about what we talked about today feel free to post them in the comments below and I'll try to point you in the right direction thumbs up you found this video helpful subscribe for more videos like this and if you have more questions you'd like to connect further you can sign up for the patreon or the free Discord links are below thanks a lot for watching bye

Channel: Elizabeth Potts Weinstein

Views: 16,969

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Id: EujG6q_K9Q0

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023