As ecommerce brands grow, small businesses often face big challenges when it comes to shipping orders on time while managing shipping costs. When you start selling on multiple sales channels and amp up order volumes, the ship station can quickly become a frustrating bottleneck in your fulfillment operation. In addition, according to a recent ecommerce consumer sentiment study, 83% of online shoppers rated shipping cost as extremely important. That means to grow your business, you need innovative ways to print cheap shipping labels and ship orders faster. Here’s how you can save money and time on shipping with Descartes ShipRush.

Print discounted shipping labels for free

Our small business shipping software provides cheap shipping labels by partnering with major carriers to provide discounted shipping rates up to 89% off retail prices. These deeply discounted rates are pre-negotiated with USPS, UPS, FedEx and other carriers, and we don’t charge label printing fees. Every time you print a shipping label for free, we receive perks from our partnership with the carriers, so it’s a win-win situation.

Rate shop to find the cheapest shipping

Did you know that USPS isn’t always the cheapest way to to ship a package? Depending on the size and weight of the parcel and the shipping destination, sometimes other carrier services offer the lowest cost. Ecommerce shippers love using our built-in rate shopping tool to easily find the cheapest shipping service for each order. You can add multiple carrier accounts to ShipRush, then compare real-time shipping rates side-by-side to find the cheapest shipping service.

Eliminate manual data entry

The process of printing shipping labels often becomes a bottleneck for small businesses, especially when growing order volumes outpace the manual processes that used to work when you were smaller. This is where shipping software can help you save time and ship orders faster. By using pre-built integrations to connect your carriers and sales channels, you will eliminate manual data entry and be ready to print a shipping label for each order as it comes in. Here’s an example of how to set up a Shopify integration, rate shop, and ship an order.

Automate recurring tasks

As a small business grows, many of the shipping process tasks such as selecting the right shipping service, typing in package dimensions and package weight, finding the cheapest shipping service, and updating tracking information can be automated using shipping automation rules for small business. As you let technology do the tedious, repetitive work, you will process and ship orders faster, saving a significant amount of time.

We are here to help you grow your ecommerce business by helping you fulfill orders quickly and efficiently while saving money. At Descartes, we believe that ecommerce shipping should be fast, efficient, and scalable, which is why we’ve dedicated ourselves to helping thousands of brands around the world ship orders faster.

If you would like help with achieving faster, cheaper shipping, try ShipRush today so you can stop spending so much time and energy on shipping and start maximizing your growth potential.