Millions of people buy e-postage from the USPS every day, in order to
ship stuff they sell on eBay. They go to the online post office every
time they need to obtain and print a stamp. So there's a real world
example showing that it's not an unworkable way of doing things.
A few moments' online research reveals that Paypal did 214.5 million
transactions last year, of which a little under half were from eBay.
A hundred million transactions a year is under 300K per day, and I'd
be surprised if as many as half of them bought online USPS postage to
ship the order.
It's easy to believe that the USPS has a system that can handle 150K
or 200K transactions a day, but that's four orders of magnitude lower
than what an e-postage system would need to handle, and their average
transaction is probably three orders of magnitude more expensive than
an e-stamp.
It would save us all a lot of time if people proposing a design would
make at least a small attempt to get the numbers right.
R's,
John
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