How Two Hives Honey Saves 10 Hours a Week with ShipStation

From war zones to beehives

Before Tara Chapman became a beekeeper, she was traveling to war zones for the US government. Intelligence work. Conflict zones. She has almost no photos from those years. It’s the kind of work where you can’t tell people where you are or what you’re doing. 

Then she took a beekeeping class.

“I very irresponsibly quit my pretty well-paying job with benefits to do this dream job,” she said.

Her mother finally exhaled.

What started as hive tours off her back porch has grown into Two Hives Honey—an agritourism destination just outside Austin that draws thousands of visitors each year to learn about bees and leave with a new appreciation for the world outside their door.

“We’re selling honey,” Chapman said. “But really what we’re selling is a love of ecology and the environment.”

Two Hives runs a farm store, leads classes, manages a quarterly subscription service, and ships nationwide. It’s a layered operation run by a small, passionate team—which means every tool they rely on has to earn its place.

The hard way

In the early days, Chapman handled shipping the way most small businesses handle it without dedicated shipping software: one order at a time, entirely by hand. Log into FedEx. Log into USPS. Manually enter the address. Check the rate. Print the label on regular paper. Fold it. Tape it to the box.

“I did that for a long time—long enough to feel the pain, that’s for sure.”

It worked when volume was low. But as “me” became “we,” the old method fell apart. Corporate gift orders were arriving 40 and 50 at a time. The subscription service meant batches of fulfillments every quarter. And every “where’s my order?” email landed with its own particular dread.

“When someone emails me and says ‘Where is my order?’ it gives me such anxiety,” Chapman said. “When people come here, we have more control over their experience. But when someone places an order, you have this gap in the human experience. I can’t control the Postal Service. I can’t control UPS.”

A new planet

Then she found ShipStation.

It changed what was possible. Chapman could share order visibility with her whole team. She could batch-import dozens of addresses at once. She could look up a customer’s full order history in seconds, from one screen, without switching between carrier websites.

One platform for the whole team

Today, everyone at Two Hives can see where an order stands. When a tracking question comes in, anyone can pull it up and respond—no bottlenecks, no knowledge trapped with one person. Corporate gift orders that once meant entering 50 addresses by hand now get imported in a single batch. The quarterly subscription service populates automatically each cycle.

During the holiday season—when Two Hives ships more than five times its normal volume—that efficiency adds up fast.

“We’re probably saving 10 hours a week using ShipStation during that high-traffic time,” Chapman said. “And that’s also a time when we’re doing a lot of our other markets, so it allows us to save labor to dedicate to those in-person markets as well.”

For small businesses shipping without a dedicated fulfillment team, that’s not just a convenience. It’s the line between staying online and shutting it down.

Back to the bees

Two Hives Honey isn’t a fulfillment operation that happens to sell honey. It’s a farm, a classroom, a community—and it needs Chapman’s full attention to run the way it should. The parts of the business she loves most don’t fit on a spreadsheet. Naming every wildflower along the path to the hives. Tasting the first batch of the season. Watching her son lead out a group of visitors in his tiny beekeeping suit.

From a beekeeping class to a thriving agritourism brand, Tara Chapman built Two Hives Honey by following her passion—and finding the right tools to protect it. If you’re still printing labels by hand, there’s a better way. Start shipping with ShipStation today.