How Spiceology Ships 3x More Orders During Peak—With Half the Team

450 blends, zero room for error

When you’re shipping over 450 unique spice blends to everyone from home cooks to celebrity chefs, the margin for error is slim—and the pressure during peak season is enormous. For Spiceology, the challenge wasn’t just keeping up with demand. It was doing so without sacrificing efficiency or blowing up labor costs.

Thanks to ShipStation’s rate shopping capabilities and automation features, the company has tripled its daily shipping output during peak periods while maintaining a flat headcount—saving thousands of dollars in the process.

From farmers’ market to big box

Spiceology has come a long way since its humble beginnings. What started just over 10 years ago as a small operation selling spice blends at farmers’ markets in Spokane, Washington, has grown into a brand found on shelves at Target, Walmart, and Costco—not to mention in the kitchens of celebrity chefs and on popular cooking shows.

“We offer over 450 different unique products, some of them across multiple sizes,” said Ned Woodward, director of logistics and fulfillment at Spiceology. “Whether it’s tailored gift sets to our direct-to-consumer customers or something we’re selling directly to chefs at restaurants or something that’s meant to be sold at grocery or at big box retail.”

Dakota Rogalette, fulfillment manager, oversees the daily operations that make all of this possible. On a typical day, the team ships hundreds of direct-to-consumer orders, plus hundreds more food service orders for chefs and distributors such as US Foods.

“My favorite is Greek Freak—it’s our Mediterranean blend,” Rogalette said. “Anything with eggs, veggies, it’s perfect. Smoky Honey Habanero is another one that kind of got us on the map. Awesome on some chicken thighs.”

The company’s collaborations with brands and culinary influencers have only accelerated demand.

The manual rate shopping problem

Before ShipStation, scaling presented a real operational headache. Like many growing ecommerce businesses, Spiceology relied on a patchwork of carrier websites to get packages out the door.

“When we originally started out, we were using UPS.com, FedEx.com, Stamps.com,” Woodward explained. “We were going to these websites, rate shopping or generating labels, printing those labels out, slapping them on the boxes, and then we had to go back into all these other systems and update everything.”

Rogalette saw the same inefficiencies when she joined the fulfillment team. 

“When I first started, we were shipping things out very manually,” she said. “We were going through every carrier to see which one had the least expensive rates and which was going to get there the fastest.”

Woodward estimates the team was dedicating roughly 12 hours per week to manual rate shopping alone. The approach was time-consuming, error-prone, and impossible to scale—especially given the company’s growth trajectory pointing sharply upward.

A one-stop shop for shipping

Spiceology has been a ShipStation customer since 2019, and the platform has become the backbone of its shipping operations. The company uses UPS, FedEx, and USPS through ShipStation, with UPS handling the majority of volume, FedEx managing third-party billing customers, and USPS proving essential during holiday pushes.

The integration with Shopify—the platform powering Spiceology’s direct-to-consumer website—has been particularly valuable. Shipping options that customers see at checkout pull directly from ShipStation through the Shopify integration, creating a seamless experience from order placement to delivery.

Conquering peak season

The real test of any shipping operation comes during the holiday rush, and this is where ShipStation has made the most significant difference for Spiceology.

“During our peak holiday Black Friday sale, we could be shipping three times our normal daily volume,” Woodward said. “So, three times the output of a normal period. ShipStation’s able to help us meet that demand with no issues.”

Beyond just handling volume, ShipStation’s rate shopping feature has delivered real cost savings. During the 2024 holiday season alone, Spiceology saved roughly several thousand dollars by using rate shopping to navigate around carrier peak season surcharges.

“At the beginning of every holiday season, carriers implement some fees based on decreased capacity because of increased volume,” Woodward explained. “We were able to anticipate those fees, understand where we had opportunities to reduce our costs, and overcome some of those financial challenges.”

Rogalette has seen the operational benefits firsthand. 

“Every year, we set a higher goal for peak season. When we started, we had to have two shifts and hire seasonal employees just to make sure we’re staying within our SLAs. Now our goals are to not put in that overtime, and not to put in that second shift.”

Doing more with less

Perhaps the most striking result of Spiceology’s ShipStation implementation is how it has changed staffing requirements. The company has increased shipments by 15% year-over-year without increasing headcount. Between 2023 and 2025, the same-day shipping rate for high-volume orders increased by 32%.

“When I started, we had about 15 people,” Rogalette said. “So year-over-year, we’re shipping out more without having to increase our staffing.”

Automation rules and custom mappings in ShipStation have played a key role in achieving this efficiency. When a customer has specific shipping requirements, the system automatically applies the right configurations instead of requiring manual entry.

“If a customer specifically needs to ship out anything UPS or FedEx or whatever it is, our ERP gets to sync that info into ShipStation and it’s just there,” Rogalette said. “We pretty much just get to print a label and ship it out that same day.”

Analytics that drive decisions

ShipStation’s reporting capabilities have also become essential for Woodward’s strategic planning. While Spiceology’s ERP—Oracle NetSuite—handles financial and inventory data, ShipStation fills a critical gap in shipping intelligence.

“All of the shipment costs, all of the shipment weights, which carriers we’re using, what zones they’re going to—all of the things that I need in order to successfully negotiate rates with our carriers and understand where we have gaps in our shipping ecosystem,” Woodward said. “All of that information lives within the reporting tools, within ShipStation’s dashboards.”

Nothing ShipStation hasn’t improved

For companies evaluating their shipping operations, Woodward’s advice centers on preparation and partnership.

“Do all your homework, do your prep, make sure you have all the materials that you need,” he said. “Make sure you have a trusted partner in shipping, like ShipStation, that you will need during the holiday. It’s a lot easier to make changes to the systems you’re using in real time if they’re set up for what could happen versus needing to scramble and find what you need in that moment.”

When asked to describe ShipStation’s impact in one sentence, Woodward didn’t hesitate.

Rogalette agreed. “ShipStation is just kind of our one-stop shop for everything. If I have to jump into another portal, it’s like, there’s no need. It does everything that we need for shipping out.”

Spiceology saved thousands in one holiday season just by rate shopping smarter. 

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