How These 4 Customers Nailed Spring Peak Season Shipping with ShipStation

Spring peak season shipping is the quiet version of the holiday rush. There’s no single date on the calendar, no universal countdown. It arrives differently for every business. A gardening surge in mid-March. Wedding confetti spiking in June. A perishable chocolate window around Easter. Bridal jewelry flooding five storefronts before summer. What unites the sellers who handle it well isn’t the size of their operation. It’s that they got their infrastructure right before the season arrived, not during it.

Four ShipStation customers share how they handled spring peak season shipping this year: a 40% volume surge, a high-stakes wedding order window, 10,000+ daily shipments of perishable chocolate, and five storefronts running at once during wedding season. The product and the pressure looked different for each. The approach that worked was remarkably similar.

When your Black Friday is March 15th

John Barr, founder of Metal Garden Beds, doesn’t talk about spring the way most ecommerce sellers do. For his company, which designs and ships modular corrugated steel raised garden beds to homeowners across the country, spring isn’t a secondary peak. It’s the peak.

“In the spring gardening business, Black Friday is March 15,” Barr said.

Volume climbs 40% or more above the off-season baseline. The team triples in size. And unlike a retailer that can start prepping in October, Barr’s shipping infrastructure has to be in place before the ground thaws—because once it does, there’s no time to troubleshoot anything.

He’s relied on ShipStation for over a decade. Before that, labels took three to four minutes each to generate. Now they take about 10 to 20 seconds—with order data flowing directly from Shopify into UPS labels, no re-entry required. Batch printing handles the volume. Automation keeps the workflow moving even when the printer is running constantly.

The math changed permanently after the switch. What was once a meaningful daily time commitment is now a non-issue—even when orders spike.

“Without ShipStation, I would probably have to bring in extra help just to get the labels printed correctly and keep shipments moving out the door,” Barr said.

More than 10 years in, he’s never had to contact ShipStation support about a platform issue. Shipping errors—common when order data had to be manually re-entered—have effectively disappeared.

“Everything else in my business is a worry. This is just nice to have one platform that runs efficiently and does what I need it to do.”

John Barr, Founder, Metal Garden Beds

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When every order lands on someone’s wedding day

Shropshire Petals runs a flower farm in Shropshire, England, where a family has been growing dried flowers for over 40 years. Today, sons Jim and John run daily operations shipping wedding confetti, floral bunches, and handmade arrangements through their Shopify store and Etsy shop.

Their spring peak runs May through September—80% more volume than winter months—and it arrives at exactly the worst time: harvest season on the farm, when the team is simultaneously growing the very product they’re shipping.

The stakes here aren’t just operational. A mislabeled package in this category isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a bride waiting for confetti for her ceremony.

Before switching to ShipStation in 2024, General Manager Laura Abrahams and her team spent two hours every morning during spring peak season shipping printing paper copies of each order, logging into Royal Mail Click and Drop separately, printing labels one at a time, and physically stapling each label to its matching order sheet. At the end of the day: another hour of manually marking each order as dispatched.

“This would cause various problems where the wrong label was attached to the wrong order, the wrong weight or service was selected, so we would have to redo the label,” Abrahams said.

The fix was connecting their Shopify and Etsy stores to their Royal Mail and Parcelforce accounts through ShipStation. Onboarding required no custom development. The team was up and running quickly.

Results were immediate. Three hours of daily manual work disappeared. Labor costs dropped 5%. And the dispatch team redirected that time to what actually matters during peak: getting more orders out the door.

“The dispatch team is just able to get much more done. We get more orders out the door, which is a massive benefit for our processing times when everyone wants their order super quick these days.”

Laura Abrahams, General Manager, Shropshire Petals

For a business where timing is personal, that reliability is the whole game.

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When your product can’t afford an extra day in transit

Norman Love Confections ships hand-painted artisan chocolates from Fort Myers, Florida. No preservatives. Fresh butter, fresh fruit, the finest available ingredients. Packaged in signature lime-green gift boxes that are part of the product experience.

And they ship 76,000+ of them a year.

Easter is one of five annual peaks—alongside Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Halloween, and Christmas. During the weeks leading up to Easter Sunday, the team may process more than 10,000 orders in a single day. The product is fragile, perishable, and the unboxing experience is part of what customers pay for.

“If a piece cracks from rough handling in transit, or a chocolate shifts and gets scuffed, the presentation is compromised, and we’ve failed the customer even if the product tastes perfect,” said Rick Murray, Director of Operations.

Norman Love Confections moved to ShipStation roughly seven years ago. Before that, the team managed shipping through a patchwork of carrier tools and manual data entry with no centralized view of what was moving through the facility. As volume scaled, that approach hit its ceiling.

What changed with ShipStation wasn’t just speed—it was precision at scale. Automation Rules now assign the correct service level, package dimensions, weight, and fulfillment flags to every order automatically—including the right number of gel packs based on box size. Labels batch-print in bulk. Daily pick lists are generated directly from ShipStation data, so the team knows exactly what to pull before the day starts.

The results: shipment volume has grown roughly 15x—from fewer than 5,000 a year to over 76,000—without a proportional increase in the fulfillment team. Batch printing alone saves two to three hours of labor per day during peak season, adding up to more than 100 hours over a six-week surge.

“Without ShipStation’s batch tools and Automation Rules, our team would spend hours each day manually configuring individual shipments. During peak season when we might process 10,000+ orders in a day, that would be physically impossible with our current team size.”

Rick Murray, Director of Operations, Norman Love Confections

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When spring peak means five storefronts running at once

Laura Lyons founded Allure Wedding Jewelry in 2014 with a clear mission: give brides more choices than what their local bridal salon could offer. What she didn’t anticipate was how quickly “more choices” would mean “more channels.”

Today, Allure sells across Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Faire simultaneously. Wedding season—which peaks in spring and early summer—hits all five at once. Orders flood in from different dashboards, shipping requirements vary by marketplace, and international customers make up a significant part of the business.

Before ShipStation, the setup couldn’t keep up. Bulk shipping software slowed computers to a crawl. Individual orders required switching to USPS Click and Ship. Every single order needed manual intervention. During wedding season, that meant hours of daily work that had nothing to do with serving customers.

“The challenge was simple but overwhelming: the enormous amount of time it would take to individually create labels,” Lyons said.

She found ShipStation at a Miva Merchant event in Austin—through another customer who was, as she recalls, raving about the platform. The switch connected all five sales channels into a single dashboard. Automation Rules eliminated manual decisions. Bulk label printing replaced one-at-a-time processing.

The cost savings were immediate. ShipStation’s pre-negotiated GlobalPost rates cut international shipping costs by nearly 50%—with faster delivery times than USPS.

“No more printing international labels through USPS—their GlobalPost solution cuts that cost by almost half and the packages arrive quicker,” Lyons said.

Ten years in, the platform now handles shipping across all five channels, inventory management for kits and bundles, a self-serve returns portal, and peak season batch processing with multiple team members working on- and off-site simultaneously. The result: consistent five-star reviews for shipping and customer service, even during the busiest weeks of wedding season.

“ShipStation is an all-in-one shipping solution that saves time and money. After 10 years, I can’t imagine running our business any other way.”

Laura Lyons, Founder, Allure Wedding Jewelry

The pattern behind all four

A 40% volume surge. A high-stakes wedding order window. A perishable chocolate operation running five peak seasons out of Florida. These aren’t the same problem.

But the approach that worked in each case is recognizable. Every one of these teams built their spring peak season shipping operation before the season hit—not in response to it. They connected their stores and carrier accounts into a single workflow. These businesses eliminated the manual steps that created errors. They let automation absorb the volume their team couldn’t.

“The biggest improvement is that it is simply one less thing I have to worry about,” Barr said. “That part of the operation is handled.”

Spring finds the gaps in every fulfillment operation. The businesses that navigate it best close those gaps before the orders arrive. Ready to build a spring peak season shipping operation that holds up? Start a free trial with ShipStation today.