How LTL Shipping in ShipStation Cut DuraWeather Poly’s Shipping Time by 40%

From startup to $14 million

Neil Mator started DuraWeather Poly in 2018 with $5,000, no customers, no suppliers, no warehouse, and no brand. He grew up working in his family’s brick-and-mortar business starting at age 10, and saw an opening in ecommerce that his family didn’t. 

So he set out on his own—first on Amazon, then on a website—building an all-weather, recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) furniture brand from nothing. He matched his family’s $3 million-a-year business in his second year. This year, he expects DuraWeather Poly to bring in $14 million.

Some orders need a pallet, not a parcel box

Not all DuraWeather Poly’s furniture fits in a parcel box. Dining sets, counter sets, fire pits, and sectionals sit on standard pallets and weigh 200 to 300 pounds. That sizing calls for less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping instead of parcel. Roughly half of all orders fell into that category, meaning DuraWeather Poly needed one system for parcel and one system to handle LTL.

Before ShipStation’s LTL integration, DuraWeather Poly’s shipping team used to quote every freight order by hand. They’d compare carriers one at a time for the best rate, then re-enter the shipment into a separate freight tool or carrier portal, completely disconnected from the Shopify order where the customer’s purchase began. Calling a carrier directly to sort out a shipment could eat up half an hour on the phone—no small thing for a company moving close to 10,000 orders a year. 

That changed when ShipStation added LTL shipping.

Bringing freight into ShipStation Global

DuraWeather Poly was already shipping parcel through ShipStation. 

So when ShipStation began rolling out LTL shipping, DuraWeather Poly paid attention. For Mator, folding freight into the same platform as parcel was an easy yes. 

“Mostly it’s the pricing,” Mator said. “We gave ShipStation all of our volume, and ShipStation was able to tell us, ‘Hey, we’ll be able to beat certain carriers’ pricing.’”

From 20 minutes to 12 minutes

Onboarding took about a month, timed to ShipStation’s brand-new LTL rollout. It landed right as DuraWeather Poly headed into its May-through-July peak season, when order volume roughly doubles the company’s slower months. LTL freight in ShipStation was up and running exactly when DuraWeather Poly needed it most. 

Once it was live, LTL shipping and parcel started showing up in the same place—no more juggling different carrier websites with different ETAs for a single order.

Order processing time dropped roughly in half, from about 20 minutes down to about 12. And the 7% to 10% in annual shipping savings ShipStation originally projected is a number Mator tracks closely.

“I’m a money man. I really want to track our profit and losses compared to previous months, based on a ratio of sales divided by shipping cost,” Mator said. “I’m fairly confident that our shipping costs have dropped quite a bit.”

Support mattered too. Mator singled out his day-to-day ShipStation contact, Xavier: “I have his personal cell phone number, and he’s really responsive. I just talked to him the other day—it was a Saturday, even.”

What’s next for DuraWeather Poly

DuraWeather Poly now moves close to half its shipments as LTL, with the rest by parcel, all tracked in one place, through its busiest months of the year. That’s a lot of freight to keep moving—and Mator says the numbers have backed up what he hoped for when DuraWeather Poly agreed to try out  LTL shipping first.

He’s already looking past this year’s $14 million in business toward what’s next, including eventually shipping to Europe, something he says only pencils out with the right freight partner in place. For now, he’s confident in the one he’s got.

If your business is looking beyond parcel-only shipping, see what LTL freight in ShipStation can do for you.