If you’re like me and you’re planning to mail out some gifts this holiday season, then you might be interested in this gadget. It shows side-by-side rate comparisons and delivery times for 20 different shipping classes from USPS, Fedex, DHL and UPS. For example if I were to ship myself across the country in a large cardboard box with a delivery time of 2 days, it would cost me $721 for UPS second day air, but only $530 for Fedex 2nd day. That’s 27% savings!!

The main issue with this gadget is its ridiculous and inexcusable use of screen real estate. A quick check shows it is occupying 417 X 700 pixels of my page in dashboard view. That’s a full 24 square inches. 24 inches Shipgooder, really? Strip out the logo and the tips, put the form fields side by side, and I bet you can get this down to a height of 100 pixels or less. While it’s interesting and somewhat unfortunate that DHL just cut 9500 jobs in the US, I’m not sure I need to see that on my homepage. Oh and that lone five-star comment you gave yourself in the directory is not fooling anyone. A quick look at Shipgooder’s site shows they’ve got quite a lot of work to do on the usability front in general, but they’ve got a great concept going here.