Ship in the US with Shippo

Connect Shippo to compare live rates from USPS, UPS, FedEx and more on every order, buy the label you want, and hand the customer a tracking number.

If you ship from or within the United States, connect Shippo. It's a multi-carrier shipping platform: instead of holding accounts with USPS, UPS, and FedEx separately, you connect Shippo once and get rates from all of them side by side on every order.

The saving is real on two fronts. You get discounted commercial rates you'd struggle to negotiate alone, and you stop guessing which carrier is cheapest for a given parcel — you can see it, per order, before you buy.

Connect Shippo

  1. Create a Shippo account at goshippo.com if you don't have one.
  2. Open Add-ons in your dashboard and find Shippo.
  3. Choose Connect with Shippo Account and authorize the connection.
  4. Add your carrier accounts in Shippo — or use the discounted rates Shippo offers out of the box.

Note: Make sure your store address is filled in and complete before you request rates. It's the "from" address on every quote, and an incomplete one produces a rate for the wrong journey — which you then pay for. See Edit your store details.

Buy a label for an order

Labels are bought per order, when you're ready to pack — not automatically on payment. That's deliberate: you can't know the parcel until you've picked it.

  1. Open the order and find the Shippo section.
  2. Enter your parcel — length, width, height, and weight. Choose your units: inches or centimeters, and pounds, ounces, or kilograms.
  3. Add more parcels if the order ships in several boxes. Each one gets its own rate.
  4. Get rates. Shippo returns what every connected carrier would charge, each with its price and estimated transit time.
  5. Pick a rate and buy the label. You get a PDF to print, plus the tracking number and a tracking link.

The tracking number is attached to the order, so your customer gets it the normal way — see Fulfill and ship an order.

Tip: Weigh and measure a packed box, not the product. The single most common cause of a surprise carrier adjustment charge weeks later is a label bought against the product's dimensions rather than the box it actually went in.

Reading the rates

You'll usually see a spread of five to fifteen options. What matters:

  • Price against transit time. The cheapest option is often two days slower. Whether that's worth $4 depends on what you promised at checkout.
  • Carrier by parcel shape. USPS tends to win on small and light; UPS and FedEx tend to win as parcels get bigger and heavier. This flips often enough that it's worth actually looking rather than defaulting.
  • Estimated days is an estimate. Don't promise a delivery date on the strength of it.

Tip: Buy a few labels manually and note which carrier keeps winning for your typical parcel. That's the rate to build your customer-facing shipping methods around — charge shoppers something close to what you actually pay.

What you charge vs what you pay

Two separate things, and it's worth being clear about which is which.

What your customer pays comes from your shipping methods — the rates you set and they see at checkout.

What you pay is the Shippo rate you buy when you pack the order.

Your job is to keep those roughly in line. Set a flat rate well under your real cost and shipping quietly eats your margin; set it well over and you lose carts at checkout. Buy labels for a couple of weeks, look at what you actually spent, then set your checkout rates from that.

FAQ

Which carriers can I use?

Whatever you connect in Shippo — USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL and others — plus Shippo's own discounted rates if you don't have carrier accounts of your own.

Does it buy labels automatically when an order is paid?

No. You enter the parcel and choose a rate per order. There's no way to automate that without knowing the box.

Can I ship internationally with it?

Shippo quotes international rates, but customs documentation is handled on Shippo's side. If cross-border is most of your volume, set it up and test it end to end before you rely on it.

I can't disconnect Shippo.

If one of your shipping methods is linked to Shippo, disconnecting is blocked so the method doesn't break. Unlink it in Shipping methods first, then disconnect.

My rates come back wrong or empty.

Almost always the addresses. Check your store address is complete — including the country — and that the customer's address has one too. An address with no country can't be quoted at all.

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