A Blog entry last August shows a nearly unreadable map of countries where we had maybe one but usually no cards yet at all. Our goal was to reach 200 countries and territories. Here’s a new map–sorry, still hard to see–showing progress. Think of this like cartoons you sometimes find in the Sunday newspaper’s comics section: spot the differences! If you need a clue, check Greenland.

This was quite an adventure. It’s difficult to source cards from much of Africa and many of the small island nations. “Difficult” of course is a relative term. Cards are there, but we’re not too keen on paying full retail online and then marking them up even more. So this became a treasure hunt, and with help from (mostly) friendly postal staff in some out-of-the-way places, we got close to our goal. One experience is worth mentioning. The cards from one country were to have gone out registered, but online tracking turned up nothing. The person at the other end apologised and said they went by ordinary post instead. When they got here two months later, the wrapper had two different registrations attached: one from that original country, and one from someplace else. Here’s the good part: the postal clerk here scanned the first barcode to get us to sign, and this triggered the original registration that had not been done. Meanwhile, that other barcode from country#2 never was active. But we got the cards. So there!

The goal for Global Postcard Sales is to raise the site’s visibility. We aren’t quite certain how to do this beyond what search engines already show, because advertising is so expensive. But we want customers to have the cards, so we’ll see what we can do. On that note, all of us here at GPS want to wish you a Happy and Healthy New Year 2017!

Until next time …