Mailing the boxes

Yesterday we mailed out our 26 boxes to Portland, so they are on their way there. The most difficult thing for us to ship is that we don't have a local address there, so we have to find "hold-for-pickup". Let me write down the experience I had this time...Here is what I found from Fedex ground, UPS ground and USPS...

Price: UPS ground> USPS > Fedex ground

Schedule a pickup:
UPS ground -- you can give them a short time frame such as 7~8 am, and they will come. You can bring the box to their store, weigh there, and pay the shipping fee there.

USPS -- for express and priority mail, you can print postage online and label the boxes. After you put all the label correctly, they can pick them up. But for parcel and media mail...you have to bring everything to the post office.

Fedex ground -- you have to give them whole day (8am~5pm), and they might come anytime. You establish an account on Fedex.com before you ship. The labels have to be on the box before they pick them up. The postage doesn't have to be correct. They will bring the box to Fedex, charge the correct shipping fee by your Fedex account, and send you an invoice.

Hold-for-pickup:
UPS ground -- depends on each "The UPS store". Many of them charge 5~10 dollars to each box to hold in their stores. They may hold the box for 5 days. You can also rent a mailbox at UPS, so the boxes will stay in their store.

Fedex ground -- no hold-for-pickup

USPS -- mails can be hold for upto 30 days. You need to fill a form online or in writing and request a "hold it" service.

In the end, we asked help from CT's project manager in Intel. We used USPS parcel mail. We used his address as our deliver address, changed CT's address to there, and requested them to hold CT's mail in the post office for 3 weeks. We also added signature delivery and insurance to the boxes, so hopefully they will be waiting for us safely in the post office in Portland.