philbish - 8:44 am on Apr 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

When paying with Endicia, the money is available immediately. Starting out you can just pre-pay money in on a credit card, and if you do a lot of volume, they'll want you to setup a bank account link.

So for the software for UPS/FedEx, just buy a cheap PC.
Or spend half a day setting up VM Ware Fusion.
This is just part of the cost of doing business, and pleasing customers.

There's a lot of legitimate reasons some prefer one carrier over the other. Maybe a certain carrier has lousy service in an area. Maybe an address isn't valid to the post office. Maybe UPS comes early in the day, but the post office comes later.