Baked Fresh, Shipped Fast: How Botham’s of Whitby Cut Label Processing Time by 75%

When Elizabeth Botham first wheeled her wooden cart across the cobbled streets of Whitby in 1865, shipping was a simple matter of showing up. A cart of buns, a market stall, a town that already knew her name. More than 160 years later, the fifth generation of her family runs a business that has outgrown those streets in the best possible way—five shops, three cafes, a national wholesale operation, and a thriving mail order service that sends freshly baked goods and hampers from Yorkshire to customers across the UK.

The baking part hasn’t changed much. The shipping certainly has.

A bakery built on cobblestones and craft

Botham’s of Whitby is exactly what it sounds like: a family bakery rooted in a place, in a tradition, and in recipes passed down through generations. They’re known for their Whitby Lemon Buns, Yorkshire Brack, Plum Bread, and Shah Ginger Biscuits—the kind of bakes that spark nostalgia before you’ve even opened the box.

That reputation has built a loyal customer base well beyond Whitby’s harbor. Today, Botham’s mail order business ships Yorkshire hampers and “Bakery by Post” orders nationwide—tea breads, morning goods, cakes, and gift items, all dispatched according to a customer’s chosen delivery date. It’s a gifting operation as much as a shipping one, and that distinction matters. When Botham’s joined ShipStation in 2021, the company’s ecommerce shipping challenge was already well-defined: seasonal peaks had outgrown the old way of doing things, and something had to change.

Growing pains in the dispatch room

Before ShipStation, every outbound parcel meant logging into a carrier dashboard and building each label by hand. It took around 2 minutes per label—manageable on a slow Tuesday, unsustainable when Christmas hamper season hit.

“The volume of parcels leaving us, particularly during seasonal sale peaks, increased quickly putting strain on previous manual systems,” noted Anita Marshall, Director of Botham’s of Whitby.

At peak, Botham’s dispatch team ships around 350 parcels a day. On a normal day, that number sits closer to 50. The gap between those two figures tells the story: a business whose demand surges seasonally, whose products are perishable, and whose customers have chosen a specific delivery date for a reason. Timing isn’t a courtesy—it’s the whole point.

Staff was bouncing between carrier dashboards, creating labels one by one, and the risk of errors grew with every order. Botham’s needed ecommerce shipping software that could keep up.

One scan, one label, no fuss

ShipStation transformed that process into two scans and a label. The dispatch team now uses Scan to Print—scanning the barcode on the packing sheet to pull up the order, then scanning the printer to trigger the label. That’s it.

Marshall described the change in equally straightforward terms. 

“The barcode scanner is an invaluable enhancement to our processes, allowing us to process orders in a couple of clicks with improved accuracy in label creation,” she said.

What once took 2 minutes now takes around 30 seconds—a 75% reduction in per-label processing time. More importantly, errors have effectively disappeared. 

“Now everything is handled by the system—we don’t get errors,” Marshall noted. 

Automation rules route orders by weight to the right carrier—DPD or Royal Mail—tag orders automatically, and ensure anything shipping to the Scottish Highlands or Islands routes via Royal Mail regardless of parcel weight. Address verification flags undeliverable orders before they ever leave the building, prompting customers to correct their details directly.

The result is a dispatch flow that runs with minimal intervention—and without adding headcount as volume has grown.

Built for gifters, not just shippers

One thing that sets Botham’s apart from a standard ecommerce operation is the order logic. Most ecommerce shipping software is built around one premise: ship as fast as possible after an order is placed. Botham’s works differently. Their orders ship on a customer-chosen delivery date—a birthday, a holiday, an anniversary, a convenient delivery date. Hampers arriving on the right day aren’t just a nice touch. They’re the product.

To bridge that gap, the team mapped the customer’s chosen delivery date to the ship-by date field in ShipStation. It was a self-led customization they figured out during onboarding, and it’s become central to how the operation runs.

Peak season, peak performance

Seasonal peaks are where ShipStation earns its keep for Botham’s. During Christmas hamper season, the team goes from roughly 50 parcels a day to around 350—a sevenfold surge—with minimal additional dispatch staff. The speed and automation of ecommerce shipping software absorbs the volume that once created a bottleneck.

With label creation down to two quick scans, the team can power through a high-volume day without the bottlenecks of before. ShipStation handles the routing logic, the label generation, the address checks—everything that used to require a human decision on every single order.

That’s the promise of the right ecommerce shipping software: not just faster labels, but the confidence to take on more business without adding friction. For Botham’s, it means the dispatch team can stay focused on getting fresh bakes out the door—not fighting their tools to do it.

After more than 160 years of building something worth sending, that feels exactly right.

Ready to spend less time on labels and more time on what you do best? Start your free trial of ShipStation today.