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One Business.
Two Shipping Operations.
What 868 merchants told us about how they manage freight today, where it fragments, and the second shipping workflow that never caught up. What emerged wasn’t a cost problem but a structural one.
ShipStation Global Q2 2026 Survey
Online survey, Q2 2026. US retail businesses with fewer than 500 employees, shipping to customers at least monthly. Respondents are employed full-time, part-time, or self-employed in retail. Company sizes range from sole proprietorships to 499 employees. All survey statistics are from this study unless otherwise noted.
Six things the data makes hard to argue with.
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1
Stability is being mistaken for health. Half of merchants describe their business as healthy. Only 15% are performing significantly better than a year ago.
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2
Shipping is the constraint, not just a cost line. 62% say high shipping and freight rates are limiting their growth—nearly double the next-biggest challenge.
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Freight isn’t an edge case. 78% of merchants ship it. It’s also the only logistics activity that more of them outsource (45%) than handle in-house (33%).
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4
The second workflow is where the money leaks. 58% of freight shippers run it through a provider that’s disconnected from parcel, so freight rates are never compared in the way parcel rates are.
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Peak concentrates the risk. Over 70% of merchants earn more than a quarter of their annual revenue in a single quarter, and their top concern going in is shipping capacity.
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6
Merchants already want one system. 74% call a single provider for parcel shipping, freight, and warehousing important or very important.
Business is stable.
That’s not the same as growing.
Merchants aren’t imagining the pressure, but they may be misreading their own position. Half describe their business as healthy. However, almost none are gaining ground, and the smallest businesses are feeling it hardest.
Retail isn’t collapsing or booming. Merchants are split almost evenly between calling conditions good and poor, meaning there isn’t a single retail economy. There are two. Different businesses can look at the same market and see different things, depending on how much of it they’re built to absorb. Size decides which one you’re in, and smaller businesses live in the harsher version. Neither version has made merchants pessimistic.
Confidence is where it gets complicated. Most describe their business as healthy. Measured that way, retail looks fine. Measured against last year, it looks stalled. Only a small fraction is doing meaningfully better. Merchants are reading stability as health. “Fine” is a comfortable place to sit for a year. Something is holding them there.
ShipStation Global Q2 2026 Survey · respondents could select all that apply, so percentages total more than 100 · bar lengths scaled to the largest response
Shipping and fulfillment stopped being a line item a while ago. Packaging, labor, and carrier fees now take up enough of the revenue to determine what a business can afford to do next. UPS and FedEx both set 2026 general rate increases near 6%, with surcharges pushing the effective increase even higher for most shippers.
ShipStation Global Q2 2026 Survey · includes packaging, labor, and carrier fees · gold bands are those above 15% · bar lengths scaled to the largest band
At these levels, shipping isn’t a cost of doing business. It’s the ceiling. And when merchants say shipping, most are only picturing half of it.
Half of all retailers say their success is directly tied to their shipping and inventory software.
ShipStation Global Q2 2026 SurveyFreight isn’t the exception.
It’s the norm.
Less-than-truckload (LTL) freight—shipments too big for parcel but not enough to fill a whole truck—is already standard practice for most merchants. The smallest operations are the holdouts.
Ask a merchant to describe their shipping operation, and you’ll likely hear about parcel: boxes, labels, carriers, rates, and the daily grind of getting orders out the door.
Freight often sits outside that picture. It sounds like someone else’s problem—pallets, loading docks, enterprise logistics teams, a category of business most small retailers don’t believe they’re in. But they are.
Nearly four in five retail merchants ship LTL freight. Not a segment. Not an enterprise tier.
Freight rarely announces itself. It shows up as an inbound inventory shipment, an occasional bulk order, and a wholesale account that outgrew boxes. It’s handled by a broker, rep, or whoever picked up the phone last time. It works, more or less, so it never gets examined.
The smaller merchants skip it entirely. That’s less a choice than a limit. Freight requires knowing how to quote it, classify it, and book it. Businesses without that capability route around it, which quietly caps how large an order they can profitably take. So freight isn’t the question. Where it lives is.
Most merchants run two shipping workflows.
They don’t have to.
Freight lives in a different system, with different carriers, and no shared view of what’s moving. Two platforms, two logins, and twice as many things that can go wrong.
For years, retail has been consolidating: fewer tools, fewer logins, fewer places to check. Every system that talks to another one is time merchants get back. But freight never made the trip. It stayed where it started—on the phone, with a broker, in a portal disconnected from everything else.
Among merchants who ship freight, more than half run it through a 3PL or broker with no connection to their parcel platform. Every quote, booking, and tracking update occurs elsewhere.
The gap is built into the workflow. Freight quoting happens outside the system holding parcel rates, so there’s no comparison to run: you get a number, and you take it, or you don’t.
The same disconnect runs downstream. Tracking in two places means answering “where’s my order?” twice as slowly. Two invoices, two sets of charges to reconcile, two support paths to remember. Merchants pay more, see less, and move more slowly.
Freight is where the operational drag compounds. Put the two workflows side by side, and every extra step on the freight side is time you don’t get back.
Freight is an outlier in another way. Merchants keep order fulfillment—pick, pack, ship—in house, along with warehousing, returns, and parcel shipping. Freight is the one thing they hand off—and the only activity where more of them use a third party than do it themselves.
ShipStation Global Q2 2026 Survey · one option selected per row · segments under 5% are unlabelled
A second workflow is manageable when volume is predictable and there’s time to chase down a quote. Then comes the one quarter of the year that’s neither.
Fragmented shipping is costing you more than just money.
Peak rewards preparation.
It punishes fragmentation.
Most merchants earn an outsized share of the year in a single quarter. The levers they pull to get ready—building inventory, extending timelines—run straight through the workflow they can’t see.
Peak isn’t a surprise. Merchants know when it lands, they know what’s riding on it, and most give themselves real runway. The typical merchant starts preparing two to three months out. But what are they preparing for?
That makes peak a now problem, not a Q4 problem—the freight and carrier decisions that shape it are being made right now, by nearly half the market already. Ask what worries them most and it isn’t demand. It’s capacity: whether shipments move at all, and what they cost when they do.
ShipStation Global Q2 2026 Survey · respondents could select all that apply, so percentages total more than 100 · bar lengths scaled to the largest response
Their dominant strategy is inventory: buy early, hold more, extend the timelines you promise customers. The most common peak strategy is also the most freight-dependent one—inbound inventory moves on pallets, booked through the workflow that sits outside everything else.
Smaller merchants have fewer options. Hiring seasonal staff isn’t realistic at ten people, so they absorb peak operationally—same two workflows, more volume in both. And most merchants are absorbing peak themselves rather than outsourcing it.
ShipStation Global Q2 2026 Survey · respondents could select all that apply, so percentages total more than 100 · bar lengths scaled to the largest response
Which is why merchants aren’t only shopping for better rates.
Peak doesn’t hand out new problems. It takes the ones you already have and multiplies them by volume.
Merchants know what they want,
but nobody has built it.
Rates open the conversation, but reliability and visibility follow close behind. And the businesses furthest ahead are already choosing partners on technology rather than price.
Ask merchants what matters in a logistics partner and rates come first. No surprise there. What comes next is the interesting part: the ability to scale during peak, then technology that shows them where things are, then a single provider covering shipping, freight, and warehousing. Four of the five things merchants weigh have nothing to do with price.
ShipStation Global Q2 2026 Survey · the grey band combines “somewhat important,” “not very important,” and “not at all important”
There’s a reason reliability and visibility rank so high. Merchants can see their customers sorting them into two groups.
Merchants who compete on experience—fast, reliable shipping, clear tracking—are pulling ahead of those who can only compete on price.
Loyalty is polarizing, and shipping is where the difference gets delivered: orders arriving when promised, tracking that answers questions before the customer asks.
Cost still opens the door. Price wins the first conversation. Platform wins the long term. But look at who isn’t motivated by price: the larger the business, the more likely it buys on technology and visibility. That’s the tell. Merchants who can afford to buy on capability do. The rest buy on price, which is what you do when consolidation isn’t on the menu.
Asked directly whether they’d consolidate, merchants don’t hesitate. In separate research conducted by McKinsey, roughly seven in ten said they’d move to a single platform that handles both parcel and freight if it met their needs. Among ShipStation customers specifically, six in ten called improving their LTL shipping a high or very high priority (ShipStation Global/Worldwide Express · McKinsey Survey, Dec. 2025).
The demand isn’t hypothetical, and it isn’t new. What’s been missing is a place where both halves of shipping live together.
Parcel. Freight. One platform.
ShipStation now supports LTL freight shipping alongside parcel—so you can quote, book, and track every shipment from a single dashboard, in the same place you already manage your parcel orders. No more toggling between systems. No more rate comparisons you never got to run.
And it isn’t a niche addition: more than 15,000 merchants already on ShipStation ship at volumes where LTL makes sense (ShipStation Global/Worldwide Express · Customer Mix Analysis, Dec. 2025).
Real-time LTL rate quotes
Real-time LTL rate quotes through the Worldwide Express carrier network, inside ShipStation. Compare rates without leaving your workflow.
Book and manage LTL orders
Book and manage LTL orders, set up pickup instructions, and handle commodities from the same place you manage parcel.
Real-time shipment tracking
Every freight shipment tracked alongside your parcel orders in one view. No separate logins, no carrier portals.
Unified invoicing via ShipStation Pay
View and pay LTL invoices inside ShipStation. One fewer vendor relationship to manage.
New to freight? You can create an account in-app and get competitive house rates in minutes. LTL support runs through ShipStation’s existing chat, phone, and form channels.
Your shipping costs are going up.
Your complexity doesn’t have to.
Whether you’re new to ShipStation or already using it every day, adding freight is faster than you think.
Join over 100,000 merchants who use ShipStation to manage parcel and freight from a single dashboard. Free trial. No credit card required.
- 1 Start your free trial—print your first label right away
- 2 Connect your store (Shopify, Amazon, eBay, and 500+ more)
- 3 Add LTL freight when you’re ready—no separate account needed
Already shipping with ShipStation? LTL freight is available directly inside the platform. Here’s how to turn it on.
- 1 Log into your ShipStation account and look for “LTL Freight” in the shipping options
- 2 Connect an existing Worldwide Express account or create a new one in-app (no prior relationship needed)
- 3 Start quoting and booking freight alongside your parcel orders
- [1] ShipStation Global Q2 2026 Merchant Survey—Online survey, n=868 U.S. retail businesses under 500 employees, shipping to customers at least monthly. All percentages are from this source unless otherwise noted. ShipStation Global Inc., Q2 2026.
- [2] ShipStation Global/Worldwide Express · McKinsey Survey, December 2025—Internal merchant survey conducted with McKinsey & Company as part of the Worldwide Express/ShipStation integration planning process. n and methodology not disclosed publicly.
- [3] ShipStation Global/Worldwide Express · Customer Mix Analysis, December 2025—Internal analysis of ShipStation and Worldwide Express customer overlap, based on shipping volume and order profiles. ShipStation Global Inc., December 2025.