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Shipping for Entrepreneurs, Startups and Small Businesses

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Shipping is a pain point for many small businesses that make it hard to compete with bigger stores that can get shipping contracts and volume discounts directly with FedEx and the others. This category lists a few vendors that can help, but of course always check out the USPS, FedEX, UPS, DHL and others as well. Almost all of these are for shipping from the U.S. only.

  • PirateShip: U.S. located businesses only (but ships worldwide), it uses the United States Post Office exclusively. Very popular with people that ship small things, like Etsy sellers. It can connect to a lot of e-commerce options, and has no monthly fees. How it works. We like that the first thing you see when you go to the rates page is a calculator for you to see if it’s worth it.
  • Stamps.com: another competitor that also uses the USPS, they integrate with a lot of online shops and also provide services to companies with physical locations and multiple locations. You pay a monthly fee (about $18 when we wrote this).
  • Shipstation: their target market is higher volume shippers and shippers with multiple online stores that want to use a common shipping platform. They have a massive amount of shipping options and e-commerce integrations.
  • PayPal Shipping: can print shipping labels directly from PayPal. USPS & UPS.
  • Shippo: they work with multiple carriers, and let you find the best rate from among them. they integrate with a lot of e-commerce stores and let you pay per label or a monthly fee. Shippo Pricing plans.
  • uShip: ships larger and bulky items. Has a partnership with Etsy, but can ship any large items like furniture, art, motorcycles, cars, and other freight.
  • EasyPost: a software API, not a shipper directly, you instead build this into your app or software to help you calculate rates and create shipments using shippers like FedEx, UPS, etc.

Other Resources – Label Makers

If you ship a lot of packages, printing out a label and taping it onto a box gets tiresome and a waste of time. These let you print on stickers that you stick to the box. All are for high volume shippers.

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