What I'm curious about is how these folks are solving the Form 1583 problem.
Congress passed a law in 2001 requiring any commercial entity to receive mail for another to submit a Form 1583A registering with their local post office as Commercial Mail Receiving Agency (CMRA). And then all their customers are required to complete a regular Form 1583 which is designed "verify" their identity and prevent mail fraud.
If they go without the CMRA the USPS can't legally deliver anything to them for their customers so all the small stuff you buy off of Amazon, eBay, etc are all right out. And for a lot of that stuff you're not going to know ahead of time if someone is going to send it via USPS or UPS or FedEx because it'll go whichever way is cheapest.
If they do the CMRA route then getting new customers is a big pain in the ass. I know this because I used to work for a well known CMRA and it was the Achilles heel of the business.
>And for a lot of that stuff you're not going to know ahead of time if someone is going to send it via USPS or UPS or FedEx because it'll go whichever way is cheapest. //
Perhaps it works because you can't send it to them by USPS so they'll never be the cheapest route.
Presumably when Amazon, say, are sending out an item they arrange the collection using some form of API and choose the optimal (by price I expect) delivery route. USPS would simply not be listed and so Amazon would route to Luna as expected.
Maybe it doesn't work like that, just a suggestion.
It would be super-great if that's how it worked, but it's not. There is no send-to-this-person-at-this-address API to see if it's OK to do so. There is no national database of who-lives-where that's in any way unified -- except maybe at the NSA -- and if there is, it's certainly not shared publicly.
Everyone's software doesn't check names in any way whatsoever. I could send a package to:
President Abe Lincoln
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington DC 20500
FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, everyone's software would eat that right up and spit out a label. That's because the name portion of the address usually doesn't mean anything. The White House is where it is irrespective of the person receiving the mail there.
Furthermore nearly all of the time this isn't an issue. The vast majority of all mail and packages go to the right address. People tend not to have items shipped to anyone but themselves or perhaps relatives. That's the reason there's a law that writes an exception to normal mail delivery only in the case where someone's doing it as a business (a CMRA).
And the only reason there's an exception there is that some (not all) CMRA owners 10-15 years ago didn't seem to care about preventing fraud and enough people got scammed to where it was a problem. It's expensive to scrutinize the incoming mail enough and that meant that the people who didn't scrutinize had higher profits so there was no corrective feedback through profits and losses. The only way to fix that was to make it a legal issue instead of an economic one.
