Merchants Are Running Two Shipping Operations, and Only Optimizing One

Most retail businesses run two shipping operations. One is integrated into their software, automated, and refined over time. The other is simply managed.

For many merchants, parcel receives the most attention. Those businesses often use rate shopping, automation, real-time tracking, returns management, and other tools that connect parcel shipping to the rest of the business.

But freight has evolved differently. It often runs through phone calls, broker relationships, separate portals, and workflows that were never integrated with anything else. Some businesses don’t even consider freight part of their shipping system.

That’s exactly the problem.

ShipStation’s 2026 Merchant Insights Report surveyed 868 US retail merchants and found that 78% already ship freight. Yet most manage it through a platform that doesn’t connect to the one handling parcel.

That’s not a niche problem. It’s a structural gap running through a significant portion of retail businesses—and, in many cases, one that nobody is actively working to optimize.

Modern shipping has always been more than parcel. Most businesses simply haven’t managed it that way.

Here’s what the data reveals, why the divide matters, and how merchants can address the fulfillment and shipping challenges that arise when running freight and parcel as separate operations.

When shipping costs start setting the limits

Shipping and freight rates limit growth for 62% of merchants—nearly double the next-closest challenge, expensive or limited warehouse space at 34%. It’s also the only challenge that appears consistently across businesses of every size.

And the costs continue to rise. Shipping costs increased over the past 12 months for 75% of merchants, while 67% now spend more than 10% of total revenue on shipping and fulfillment.

At those levels, shipping and fulfillment costs don’t just affect margins. They can limit what a business can afford to do next.

But here’s the part many merchants miss when they talk about “shipping”: they’re often only looking at half of the operation.

Freight is still operating outside the system

Freight is now the norm: 78% of merchants already ship freight—handling shipments that are too large for traditional parcel networks but don’t require an entire truckload. In less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping, multiple shippers share trailer space and each pays for the capacity their freight occupies.

Whether freight originates from a bulk order, a growing wholesale account, or another part of the business, it’s often handed to a broker or representative. Once the shipment moves successfully, the process rarely gets a second look because it “works, more or less.”

The businesses that don’t ship freight tend to be the smallest, and that isn’t always a strategic choice. Freight requires merchants to understand how to quote, classify, and book shipments. Without that capability, businesses can quietly limit the size of orders they can accept—and the revenue and profit those orders could generate.

The result is two completely different shipping workflows inside the same business, with only one receiving consistent attention and optimization.

That’s where the problem becomes structural.

Among merchants that ship freight, 58% use a third-party provider that isn’t connected to their parcel platform. Every quote, booking, tracking update, and invoice occurs elsewhere. Teams move between carrier portals, wait for emailed quotes, and reconcile separate invoices. Manual handoffs appear throughout the process.

Comparing the parcel and freight workflows side by side:

• Parcel: An order enters the system, rates are automatically compared, a label prints, tracking flows back to the order, and billing is managed through the same platform.
• Freight: Someone emails or calls a broker, waits for a quote, has limited visibility into alternatives, books via a phone call or a separate portal, tracks the shipment elsewhere, and then receives another invoice.

Every additional step creates opportunities to lose time, visibility, and money. Building a smarter freight strategy starts with understanding what that second workflow is actually costing the business.

Freight is an outlier in another important way. Merchants often keep fulfillment, warehousing, returns, and parcel shipping under their direct control. Freight is the activity they’re most likely to hand off to a third party—and more than a fifth of merchants skip it altogether.

That’s the second workflow in a nutshell: not necessarily a system merchants deliberately chose, but one that was never integrated into the rest of the operation.

Peak season exposes the cracks

A second workflow can seem manageable when volume is predictable, and there’s time to chase down a quote. Then comes the one quarter of the year when neither is true.

More than 70% of merchants earn over a quarter of their annual revenue in a single quarter, while 25% generate more than 40% of their annual revenue during peak season. And businesses aren’t waiting until Q4 to prepare: when the survey was conducted in the second quarter of 2026, 45% were already preparing for peak or planned to begin within the following month.

Ask merchants what concerns them most heading into peak, and the issue isn’t simply generating demand. It’s whether they have the capacity to handle it, whether shipments can move reliably, and what those shipments will cost when volume increases.

When shipping operations are fragmented, those pressures become harder to manage. The manual freight workflow, which is merely inconvenient during normal periods, can become a bottleneck when volume spikes, and teams have less time to intervene.

Price opens the conversation. Capability closes it.

When merchants rank what matters most in a logistics partner, rates come first—no surprise there. What’s more interesting is everything that follows.

Better carrier rates matter to 88% of merchants. But the ability to scale during peak season, technology that provides real-time visibility across the fulfillment operation, and access to a single provider for shipping, freight, and warehousing rank close behind.

Cost still opens the door. Saving money is the top reason 32% would switch logistics providers—more than any other single reason.

But larger businesses are already looking beyond price alone. Companies with 50 or more employees are three times as likely as the smallest businesses to choose a logistics partner based on technology and visibility rather than cost.

That distinction matters. As operations become more complex, the value of a logistics platform isn’t limited to negotiating a better rate. It’s also about reducing the number of systems, handoffs, and disconnected workflows required to move an order from start to finish.

Asked directly whether they would value consolidating freight and parcel shipping on a single platform, merchants are clear: 74% say having a single provider for parcel shipping, freight, and warehousing is important or very important.

What’s been missing is a practical way to bring both halves of the shipping operation together.

Shipping works better as a system

For years, merchants have invested heavily in making parcel shipping faster, more automated, and easier to manage. Freight hasn’t always received the same treatment.

That divide may have been manageable when freight represented an occasional exception. But with nearly four out of five merchants now shipping freight, it increasingly looks like a core part of the operation that has simply remained disconnected from the systems around it.

The opportunity isn’t just to find better freight rates. It’s to eliminate the idea that freight and parcel need to operate as separate businesses inside the same company.

The merchants that bring those workflows together can reduce manual handoffs, improve visibility, and create a more consistent process across the full range of shipments they need to move.

Get the full report

This post covers the outline. The full 2026 Merchant Insights Report goes deeper into the data—showing how shipping costs, fragmented freight workflows, and peak-season pressure affect merchants differently based on company size.

It also explores what merchants want from logistics partners and what it will take to bring freight and parcel shipping under one roof.

Read the full 2026 Merchant Insights Report for the complete data set and a closer look at how merchants can begin to run freight and parcel as one connected shipping operation rather than two.

Todd Greenbaum

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