Best Shipping Software for Small Businesses in 2023

Find the best shipping rate by browsing and comparing options from multiple carriers.

• Discounted shipping rates: All plans receive deeply discounted UPS rates and discounted USPS Commercial Plus rates. ShippingEasy also works with your own negotiated rates.
• Exclusive Priority Mail service rates: “Flat Rate Green” is ShippingEasy’s exclusive discounted dimensional pricing for USPS Priority Mail services. It provides low costs on parcels weighing 20lbs or less, with more dimensional flexibility than standard Flat Rate packaging.
• Integrations: ShippingEasy directly integrates with 65 other tools, including 60 popular ecommerce platforms and solutions such as Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Magento, WooCommerce, Etsy, BigCommerce, Walmart, PayPal, and more. Connect your USPS, FedEx, UPS, or DHL account for streamlined shipping.
• Automation: Save time and labor by easily programming rules into your shipping workflow to automate shipment selections, tracking updates, confirmation emails, buy and print functions, label creation, order splitting, FBA routing, and more.
• Order management: ShippingEasy gives you split/combine/recombine functions, batch processing, CSV entry, customizable grouping, manual entry/editing, gift options, returns management, and more. It also offers customizable packing slips, barcode creation, and location support for picking and packing.
• Inventory management: Manage your stock with real-time inventory tracking, product catalog support, product image support, customizable categories, and barcode compatibility.
• Marketing tools: ShippingEasy’s Customer Marketing add-on gives you fully customizable plug-and-play templates and contact/data management tools to supercharge your email marketing. It also includes campaign management, feedback requests, and interactive metrics.
• Peripheral hardware: Use thermal/laser printers, scales, and barcode scanners through ConnectEasy—the company’s proprietary connectivity application.
• Customer service: Highly rated support is available by live chat, phone, and email to Basic-level users and above. Customers on the Starter plan are limited to forum communication with support staff.
• Online resources: Reference ShippingEasy’s marketing resource hub, case study reports, shipping guides, blogs, checklists, forums, and calculator tools.
• Highly rated: ShippingEasy is rated 4.8/5 from about 1,100 user reviews on Capterra, and 4.6/5 from over 60 reviews on G2.

ShippingEasy isn’t compatible with direct connections to dropshipping suppliers, making it a poor choice for sellers doing a high volume of dropshipped sales. The program does allow users to mark an order as “shipped” at any stage—which is a work-around used by occasional dropshippers—but Ordoro is a far better choice for sellers needing vendor connectivity.

If you ship both parcels and LTL truck freight, ShipStation readily integrates with a larger range of carriers than ShippingEasy. Plus, it offers a mobile app, while ShippingEasy doesn’t.

The limitations on ShippingEasy’s lowest-level plan is another area of compromise. Starter plan users don’t have access to international shipping, FedEx integration, or customer support (except through a public forum).

Ordoro’s rate-shopping tool isn’t as easy to use as our other picks, but will still help you find the best rate for every package. (Source: Ordoro)

• Discounted shipping rates: All plans receive discounted USPS Commercial Plus rates and discounted shipping insurance.
• Integrations: Ordoro integrates with eight shipping carriers, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL, plus 38 other ecommerce platforms and solutions. Open API is available on the Premium plan.
• Automation: Ordoro provides advanced automation features to program rules and maps into your shipping workflow. Dropshippers can set up manual, semi-automatic, or fully automatic dropshipping.
• Supplier management: Assign suppliers to products, track specific costs, customize workflows, and allow access to a vendor portal.
• Order management: Manage returns, receive and restock goods, initiate RMAs (return merchandise authorizations), and view orders from all sales channels from your dashboard. Plus, access built-in address validation and barcode scanning.
• Inventory management: Premium plan users can access advanced inventory management features, including multichannel inventory sync, real-time inventory tracking, stock alerts, allocation, and one-click purchase order (PO) creation. Multichannel sellers can link product listings on various channels to a “master product” in your Ordoro inventory catalog.
• Marketing tools: Create a branded experience by customizing labels, packing slips, outbound emails, and tracking pages.
• Peripheral hardware: Ordoro supports USB scales, plus scanner and printer connectivity.
• Customer service: Austin, TX-based support staff is available by phone or email Monday through Friday, 7 a.m.–5 p.m. Pacific time. Limited email support is offered on weekends.
• Online resources: Ordoro hosts a resource library with videos, guides, case studies, a blog, and an API forum.

Ordoro’s biggest drawback is its pricing model. Some of the most important features—such as inventory management capabilities, API access, and returns processing—are only available on the Premium plan, which may be unaffordable for many small businesses.

Additionally, the software is incompatible with scan-based return labels and can’t display live shipping rates at checkout. Nor does it have a mobile app. For these features, we recommend ShipStation.

Easyship’s rate comparison tool calculates the rate option that provides the best value. (Source: Easyship)

• Discounted shipping rates: All plans receive discounted USPS Commercial Plus rates as well as discounted UPS and DHL Express rates.
• Integrations: Easyship integrates with 13 shipping carriers, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL, plus 31 other ecommerce platforms and solutions. Open API is also available.
• Automation: Easyship provides basic automation capabilities to program shipping rules on all free and paid plans.
• Supplier management: Assign suppliers to products, track specific costs, customize workflows, and allow access to a vendor portal. Enterprise plan users can access supplier and third-party warehouse direct integration.
• Order management: Manage orders and returns from Easyship’s dashboard, which features advanced search and filtering tools.
• Inventory management: Easyship lets you manage shipping-related product information (such as dimensions and category) to work in tandem with your ecommerce platform’s inventory management features.
• Marketing tools: Create a branded customer experience by adding your logo and custom text to packing slips, outbound emails, and dedicated tracking pages.
• Customer service: All paid plan users can access 24/7 live chat support. Phone support is available to Premier and Enterprise subscribers, while users on Easyship’s free plan can contact support through email or Facebook messaging.
• Online resources: Easyship’s online resource hub features extensive tutorials in addition to free shipping tools, case studies, a blog, and ecommerce shipping guides.

Easyship’s limited range of paid plans means that some users might be paying for a plan with a significantly greater shipment allowance than they need. To ensure you only pay for what you actually use, we prefer Shippo’s wide range of 11 plan options.

Additionally, Easyship users can’t connect useful hardware like shipping scales or scanners, which could create an obstacle for businesses that rely on these devices in their shipping workflow. ShippingEasy is the better choice for peripheral connectivity.

We also found that the platform lacks functionality when it comes to inventory and order management and doesn’t provide the option to modify user permissions (which can be a helpful feature for dropshippers). While Easyship can accomplish the basics, Ordoro is a more robust multifunctional tool.

ShipStation’s advanced tagging feature makes managing orders and shipments more efficient. (Source: ShipStation)

• Discounted shipping rates: All plans receive discounted USPS Commercial Plus rates, discounted UPS rates, DHL Express Worldwide Shipping Discounts, and more.
• Integrations: ShipStation integrates with 53 shipping carriers, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL, plus 70 of the top sales channels and 215+ other ecommerce platforms and solutions. Open API is also available.
• Automation: ShipStation supports setting product defaults and preset groups, service mappings, and automation rules that apply preset actions to selected orders.
• Order management: All ShipStation plans come with standard order management features—plus a robust returns management platform with a branded returns portal for your customers. Pick and pack features are also included to minimize packing errors.
• Inventory management: Basic inventory management features are accessible from ShipStation’s web or mobile app, including catalog support, stock allocation, inventory alerts, and syncing.
• Marketing tools: Create a branded experience by customizing labels, packing slips, outbound emails, and tracking pages.
• Peripheral hardware: Use thermal/laser printers, scales, and barcode scanners through ShipStation Connect—the company’s proprietary connectivity application.
• Customer service: Support staff is available Monday through Friday, 6 a.m.–6 p.m. Pacific time. Phone support is only available to top-tier, Enterprise plan users. Chat support is available to Bronze plans and higher. Email response times may exceed one business day.
• Online resources: Reference ShipStation’s extensive integrations help guide, workflow guides, troubleshooting guide, mobile help guide, FAQ, forum, YouTube tutorials, and webinar library.

While its aggregate rating isn’t bad, we found that an overwhelming number of reviews left for ShipStation in the past 12 months were ardently negative. Users frequently report bugs and known issues persisting without attention from the development team, plus extremely poor customer service.

Many small businesses may not need customer service from their shipping software—especially if you’re using only prebuilt integrations and selling volumes below enterprise level. But if accessible support is important to you, ShippingEasy is a much better choice than ShipStation.

ShipStation lacks a free plan, and its pricing is slightly more expensive than the other providers on our list. Because of this, we recommend seeking a free alternative if you’re a low-volume shipper.

We also found that ShipStation isn’t the most functional choice for dropshipping management. Through granular user permissions options, you can grant your suppliers a ShipStation user account that only has access to specific orders. This workaround makes dropshipping possible—but a bit tricky. If a portion of your sales come from dropship suppliers, we recommend Ordoro instead.

OrderCup displays live shipment status updates in an accessible, icon-coded format. (Source: OrderCup)

• Discounted shipping rates: All plans receive discounted USPS Commercial Plus rates and discounted shipping insurance. OrderCup also works with your own negotiated rates.
• Shipping perks: Every account receives access to free pickups, free shipping supplies, and free global address verification.
• Integrations: OrderCup has 36 direct integrations, including 19 popular ecommerce platforms and solutions like Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Magento, WooCommerce, Etsy, BigCommerce, Walmart, and PayPal. Connect your USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Amazon, Canada Post, Purolator, and UK Mail accounts for streamlined shipping. No API is currently available.
• Automation: Create automated defaults, predefined package types, and profiles for your shipping methods. OrderCup has sophisticated filtering to categorize order and shipping rules to automate processing—plus automated insurance rules to decide which orders to insure for how much.
• Order management: All OrderCupplans come with basic order management features, such as batch processing, CSV entry, manual entry/editing, returns management, and more.
• Inventory management: Manage your stock by using OrderCup’s product catalog support with warehouse assignment options and automatic syncing through multiple channels.
• Marketing: Send and automate branded outgoing emails, packing slips, and tracking notifications.
• Peripheral hardware: OrderCup supports web-based direct printing of labels, customs forms, and packing slips to most thermal and laser or inkjet printers, plus zero-configuration scale and scanner support on PCs and Macs.
• Customer service: Support is available to all plans 7 days a week, 7 a.m.–6 p.m. Pacific time—plus a separate Europe-based support center operating 7 a.m.–6 p.m. GMT. There is also the option to add Premium Support for $50/month, which gives you access to toll-free telephone support and assigns higher priority to your support tickets.
• Online resources: Reference OrderCup’s video library and blog.
• Highly rated: OrderCup is rated 4.8/5 from some 300 user reviews on the Shopify App Store, and 5/5 from about 20 reviews on the BigCommerce App Store.

Many competing shipping solutions have functionality that could potentially replace other tools in your arsenal, whereas OrderCup is much more rudimentary. Furthermore, it lacks the ability to work for dropshippers. For advanced dropshipping and inventory management features, we recommend Ordoro.

OrderCup isn’t as scalable as other options, either. The 12,000-shipment cap on its highest-level plan could mean needing to eventually migrate to another solution. Plus, its sparse integrations could pose a problem for high-volume sellers.

We found that OrderCup has the most limited reporting and analysis capabilities of the providers on our list. It does present helpful data on sales, shipments, orders, and costs, but ShippingEasy’s customizable reporting options are more advanced.

Shippo’s straightforward label generator gives you the cheapest and fastest shipping options, as well as a variety of other rates.

• Discounted shipping rates: All plans receive discounted USPS Commercial Plus rates and discounted DHL express rates.
• Integrations: Shippo integrates with 25 shipping carriers, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL, and 88 other ecommerce platforms and solutions. Open API is also available.
• Automation: All paid plans can create automation rules within the web app to program package templates and shipping actions.
• Order management: Manage returns, receive and restock goods, and view/filter orders from your Shippo dashboard—plus built-in global address validation and partial fulfillment options to split an order into multiple shipments.
• Inventory management: Shippo’s platform stores package- and product-related data, but lacks robust inventory management functionality. Users may want to connect a dedicated inventory management app.
• Marketing tools: Add branding and custom text to email notifications and tracking pages.
• Peripheral hardware: Shippo does not support connectivity with peripheral devices.
• Customer service: San Francisco-based support staff is available by email, or live chat 6 a.m.–6 p.m. Pacific time Monday through Friday, and 6 a.m.–2 p.m. Pacific time Saturdays and Sundays.
• Online resources: Shippo hosts a resource database that includes tutorials, guides, case studies, e-books, webinars, podcasts, and a shipping encyclopedia.

Shippo is one of the pricier providers on our list, and it doesn’t offer a truly free starter plan. It also limits the majority of its paid plans to five user accounts, and additional users cannot be added. If you need to create accounts for your team but don’t want to invest in an enterprise-level custom plan, Ordoro is a better choice.

It’s also missing peripheral connectivity to work with devices like scanners and scales. If you frequently use shipping hardware, ShippingEasy may be a better fit.

Unlike Easyship and ShipStation, Shippo doesn’t offer a mobile app, and many reviews state that its web app is not mobile-friendly. Plus, its inventory and order management capabilities are limited, leaving users to rely on other connected apps.