FFys
- Treat vendors as genuine partners to enhance customer experience and brand reputation.
- A vendor feature is a credibility asset, affirming legitimacy, vetting, and helpful operations.
- Build genuine vendor partnerships by defining success, collaborating, and sharing relevant data.
- To earn a vendor feature, present a teachable story along with tangible metrics and supporting assets.
- Leverage vendor features post-publication to boost trust, enhance sales, and create educational content.
[Estimated reading time 10 minutes. Yeah, it’s long, but I promise, it’s so worth it].
How to Turn Vendors into Brand Allies
A vendor can ship you boxes. A true partner can help carry your reputation. Most businesses treat vendors like utilities: pay the bill, get the service, move on. But the companies that scale fastest do something different. They build vendor partnerships that create reliability, resilience, and sometimes something rare: a major brand telling your story in public.
If you want your business to grow without chaos, you cannot treat your vendors as “outside the building.” Your shipping, payment, software, packaging, and logistics vendors touch your customer experience every day. When you collaborate with them as teammates, you achieve better outcomes and sometimes earn something even rarer: a public case study or profile that boosts trust for both sides.
That is why the Stamps.com customer story about ScanMyPhotos is worth studying, not copying.
Why a vendor feature is such a big deal
A profile on a major vendor’s site is not “nice PR.” It is a credibility asset. It signals three things to the market:
-
A real brand vetted you. They put their name next to yours.
-
Your operations are legitimate. You have volume, process, and standards.
-
Your story is helpful in other businesses. It is proof, not promises.
Stamps.com frames ScanMyPhotos as a business that scaled to preserve over a billion photos, with shipping reliability at the center of its operation.
What the Stamps.com story teaches
The best testimonials are not “we love this tool.” There are stakes, specifics, and consequences.
Here are three lines from the Stamps.com feature that show how to do it right:
-
On scalability
“Stamps.com helped us scale. We could never have preserved more than a billion photos without them.” -
On the stakes of logistics
“When you’re mailing people’s lifetime of memories, you don’t get second chances.” -
On reliability and peace of mind
“Stamps.com turned shipping into something we never need to worry about … it’s the backbone of our fulfillment operation, and makes complex logistics feel simple.”
Notice what is happening here: this is not about labels. It is about trust, removing failure points, and the customer experience.
Tutorial part 1: How to build genuine vendor partnerships
This is the playbook I wish every business owner had learned earlier.
1) Pick vendors you can actually grow with
If your vendor cannot handle your “best month ever,” they are not a growth partner. They are a temporary tool. Look for vendors who already serve businesses bigger than yours, and whose product roadmap clearly supports scaling.
2) Tell them what “success” means in your world
Most vendor relationships fail because the vendor never hears your definition of failure. For ScanMyPhotos, the definition is simple and brutal: shipping errors are unacceptable because the contents are irreplaceable. The Stamps.com story reports that the business achieved a zero-error rate through automation and address checks.
Define your own version of that. Examples:
-
“Late deliveries create refunds.”
-
“Damaged packaging kills repeat orders.”
-
“Chargebacks erase margin.”
-
“One wrong label costs an account.”
3) Use support like a collaboration channel, not a complaint box
If you only contact vendors when you are mad, you train the relationship to be defensive.
Instead:
-
Share patterns, not just incidents
-
Ask “How would you set this up if you were us?”
-
Permit them to tell you hard truths about your process
4) Bring them data they can use
Vendors love numbers because numbers turn into internal wins.
Examples you can track in a simple note:
-
hours saved per week
-
error rate before vs after
-
support tickets reduced
-
shipping costs per order
-
delivery speed improvements
-
customer satisfaction mentions tied to shipping
The Stamps.com story highlights savings of 80+ hours per month and a zero error rate. That is case study fuel.
5) Treat the relationship like it touches your brand, because it does
Your customer does not care where “your company” ends and “the vendor” begins. If the box arrives late or broken, it is your fault in their mind.
So you make vendors part of your internal standard:
-
documented workflows
-
training
-
backups
-
escalation contacts
-
quarterly check-ins
Tutorial part 2: How to earn a vendor feature
Vendor stories do not happen because you ask once. They happen when you make it easy and valuable for them.
Step-by-step
-
Collect your proof
2 to 5 metrics. One customer trust angle. One “before” pain point. One “after” result. -
Write the pitch in one paragraph
What changed, why it mattered, and what you can quantify. -
Offer assets
-
a short founder photo
-
3 quotes (like the ones above)
-
3 operations photos that do not expose customer info
-
a 5 bullet timeline of growth
-
Make the story about their audience
A vendor is trying to help other businesses make the right choices. Your job is to provide a story that teaches, not brags.
Here is a template you can copy:
Subject: Customer story idea with real numbers
Body: We’ve used [Vendor] since [year]. Before [Vendor], our biggest issue was [pain]. After implementing [feature], we improved [metric] from [before] to [after]. The stakes are high because [why it matters to customers]. If helpful, I can provide photos, exact metrics, and three short quotes.
Tutorial part 3: What you do after you get featured
A vendor feature is only valuable if you deploy it correctly.
The innovative ways to use it
-
Put it on a Trust page on your site
-
Add it to your sales outreach as a third-party credibility link
-
Turn it into a hiring asset: “This is how we operate.”
-
Use it in partner conversations: it signals maturity, and always be realistic and honest.
-
Repurpose it into 3 to 5 educational posts:
-
One on process
-
One mistake you fixed
-
one of the key metrics
-
one on customer trust
-
one on the vendor relationship lesson
Stamps.com positions these stories as “customer stories” meant to help other business owners evaluate tools and scale.
The ScanMyPhotos connection
Here is the takeaway from the Stamps.com story. ScanMyPhotos did not get featured because they “used shipping software.” They got featured because their business has unusually high emotional stakes, and they built operations designed to protect those stakes. The story repeatedly emphasizes that shipping is central to the customer promise, not a back-office task.
That mindset, not the logo, is what other business owners should copy:
-
Decide what cannot fail
-
Choose vendors that reduce failure points
-
Build process until reliability becomes boring
-
Share measurable outcomes
-
Turn the partnership into a mutual win
Here is the original article on the Stamps.com website so you can see the full context:
How ScanMyPhotos Built a Billion-Photo Business with Stamps.com and USPS
ScanMyPhotos built a business preserving over a billion irreplaceable family photos—with Stamps.com and USPS Priority Mail ensuring every memory arrives home safely.
ScanMyPhotos went from scanning a handful of photos for local customers to preserving over a billion memories for families across the nation—and shipping sits at the center of every order. By pairing Stamps.com with USPS Priority Mail®, CEO Mitch Goldstone and his team transformed their fulfillment operation into a system so reliable that they rarely think about it.
From film labs to digital preservation
Goldstone and his business partner of the past 35 years, Carl Berman, opened their first retail photo labs in Orange County, California, in 1990. When digital imaging disrupted the entire industry, he rebuilt the business from the ground up. What emerged was ScanMyPhotos—a service dedicated to digitizing printed photos, slides, film negatives, videotapes, and home movies for families and organizations nationwide. Nearly every order arrives by mail. Customers trust ScanMyPhotos with irreplaceable memories—wedding photos, childhood snapshots, decades of family history captured on film. Getting those materials back safely and quickly isn’t just a service promise—it’s the foundation of the entire business.
When the national media changed everything
In August 2008, The New York Times published a central tech feature on ScanMyPhotos. Overnight, orders exploded. “Everything changed,” Goldstone explained. “Orders came flying in. We had no infrastructure.” Before that moment, the team mailed almost nothing—just a handful of local online orders. Suddenly, they were shipping thousands of boxes with handwritten labels and daily trips to the Post Office to refill their Pitney Bowes postage meter. There was no proper tracking, no automation, and no way to keep pace with demand.
Goldstone signed up with Stamps.com immediately. Then came USA Today, The Today Show, and eventually CBS Evening News, featuring two of their customers. Each media appearance drove another spike in volume, and Stamps.com scaled right alongside them.
Building on a USPS foundation
For ScanMyPhotos, carrier choice came down to one thing: trust. “When you handle people’s most irreplaceable memories, everything has to be perfect,” Goldstone said. “USPS Priority Mail® gives us the speed and reliability we rely on, and Stamps.com gives us the tools to use it with total accuracy.” Goldstone attends CES in Las Vegas every year, and his first stop is always the USPS exhibit. “They’ve been showcasing new mail technology there for many years,” he noted. “Stamps.com is connected with USPS, and it reminds me how central the mailing ecosystem is to American commerce.”
SCAN Forms: The efficiency multiplier
One feature stands out in daily operations: USPS SCAN Forms. Instead of having the post office scan every package individually, the team hands off hundreds of shipments with a single barcode scan. “It helps organize and enter the tracking system at the same time for accuracy,” Goldstone explained, “speeding the process up.”
Automation that eliminated errors
Before Stamps.com, manual processes created constant risk. A wrong label or a small typo could mean real trouble for irreplaceable photos. “Before Stamps.com, we handled everything by hand, and the error rate was high because there were so many manual steps,” Goldstone recalled. “Today, with Stamps.com, our error rate is literally zero. Every label, every address check, and every scan is automated and accurate. When you’re mailing people’s lifetime of memories, you don’t get second chances.”
The features that made the most significant difference:
- Batch label printing for high-volume processing
- Address verification to catch errors before they ship
- USPS SCAN Forms for streamlined handoffs
- Shipping presets that save time on repeat configurations
- Multi-carrier options when needed
- Saving hours every day. The time savings have been transformative. Goldstone estimates that Stamps.com saves his team 3 to 5 hours daily—more than 80 hours each month that used to be spent on manual shipping tasks.
“Nothing we ship can ever go wrong,” he said. “People send us their most precious, irreplaceable pictures, so every label, every scan, every address must be 100% accurate.” The team has even added a unique customer option: encouraging customers to include GPS trackers, such as AirTags, inside their boxes. Goldstone says 38% of orders now include one, allowing customers to track their memories in real time—in addition to the tracking Stamps.com provides through USPS. Stamps.com takes the pressure off by automating the steps that used to slow us down or leave room for errors.
A partnership built on trust
ScanMyPhotos has used Stamps.com since 2008—nearly two decades of partnership. In the early days, the team reached out to support more frequently. Today, they rarely need to. “The system is that reliable,” Goldstone said. “And when we do need help, the response is always fast, accurate, and friendly.” That reliability matters for a business built on preserving irreplaceable memories. Stamps.com helped us scale. We could never have preserved more than a billion photos without them. When asked to describe the impact of Stamps.com in one sentence, Goldstone didn’t hesitate: “Stamps.com turned shipping into something we never need to worry about—it’s the backbone of our fulfillment operation, and makes complex logistics feel simple. The gold standard for accuracy and trust.” His advice for other business owners? “Don’t wait. We already researched for you. Stamps.com is reliable, easy to use, saves money, and is built for real growth.”
Frequently asked questions (Stamps.com FAQs)
How do I stop treating vendors as transactional? Start by defining the customer experience you are protecting, then invite the vendor into that goal with metrics and regular check-ins.
What vendors are most important to build partnerships with? Any vendor that directly impacts customer trust: shipping, payments, customer support platforms, and core operations software.
How do I ask a vendor to feature my business? Pitch a teachable story with numbers, offer assets, and make it about helping their audience make a better decision.
[Revised on December 17, 2025].
