ShipStation Global Brings Freight Into the Same Lane as Parcel

Small and midsize shippers are often forced to stitch together various tools for parcel labels, freight quotes, tracking, and much more. The fragmentation gets more expensive as a business grows past pure e-commerce, since the moment a merchant needs to move inventory between warehouses or ship a pallet instead of a box, they’re forced out of whatever platform runs their day-to-day shipping and into unfamiliar territory. 

ShipStation Global CEO Tom Madine has built the company’s post-merger strategy around closing that gap, knowing that the same merchants who came to the platform for parcel labels are increasingly buying freight, too, and would rather not leave the software to do it.

The LTL rollout is the first major product integration since Thoma Bravo acquired WWEX Group (parent of Worldwide Express, GlobalTranz, Unishippers, JEAR Logistics and BLX Logistics) and merged it with Auctane, the parent company of ShipStation, this past June. The combination created ShipStation Global, a company now valued at roughly $12 billion. CEO Tom Madine described the logic of putting the two businesses together as less about scale for its own sake and more about closing a gap both companies kept running into with customers.

“If you think about an e-commerce merchant that’s selling through multiple channels, using multiple carriers with inventory in multiple places, it makes that a much more seamless and stress-free process for them, and allows them to manage everything through a single pane of glass,” Madine said of the legacy ShipStation product, before pointing to what it had been missing. “There’s nothing else like it on the market.”

According to Madine, that gap had shown up repeatedly in customer surveys. “One of the most common requests that ShipStation would get in the legacy Auctane world was, ‘When are you going to add other modes to the platform?’” he said. “Prior to today, if you were a ShipStation user, you were managing your entire workflow in ShipStation, except when you needed to move freight.” Merchants who needed to move inventory between warehouses had to leave the platform entirely, log into a separate freight system, and reconcile the two.

LTL was the logical starting point given how much of it already runs through e-commerce middle-mile moves, and ShipStation Global isn’t treating the launch as a soft rollout. The platform now connects to a network of more than 75 LTL carriers, with over 50 live at launch, giving merchants real-time rate comparison and order management inside the same interface they use for parcel. Roughly 78% of ShipStation’s merchants already ship freight in some form, but the company has said more than half of them have been managing it through separate systems until now. 

Chief Product Officer Travis Rimel called the addition overdue for the customer base: “Freight was the missing piece for ShipStation customers, and now it’s here,” he said. “This isn’t just a new feature; it’s a foundation.”

The point, Madine said, isn’t to help shippers find the cheapest possible rate. “What enables customers to have the best experience is that they can use data and intelligence to help them make better decisions,” he said, describing how the platform surfaces things like estimated arrival time and damage likelihood alongside price. “Cheapest is not always best… it’s about making the best decision so that your supply chain works the way it’s supposed to.”

Two customers ShipStation Global brought onto the show made the point in very different ways. Toyota Racing Development ships nine to 12 850-pound race engines a week between its Costa Mesa, California, build shop and NASCAR teams in North Carolina. For that kind of freight, a missed delivery is a public failure, not simply a shrugged-off delay. 

“We decided that we were going to consolidate these on a straight truck, expedited from Costa Mesa, California to North Carolina every week,” said Mike Grayson, Chief Relationship Officer and EVP of ShipStation Global, describing the shift away from air freight the two companies worked out together. 

TRD’s Kevin Warner said the switch actually improved reliability despite the perception that ground transport is slower: “By going to ground, it allowed us to have much more control, much more reliability on the process and also less handling.”

Grayson said that’s the kind of complexity ShipStation Global is used to solving at the top of its customer base. “We have dozens of Fortune 100 companies that we work with, TRD being one of those,” he said. “We’re able to also take that and bring it downstream to the SMB sector… just because you’re not doing all the complexity that an enterprise customer is doing, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t provide to you the same level of service.”

On the other end of that spectrum was Spiceology, a spice brand that started at farmers’ markets and now ships everything from direct-to-consumer parcels to full truckloads for retail and food-service accounts. Director of Logistics and Fulfillment Ned Woodward said COVID was the inflection point that forced the company off manual processes. 

“We went from processing larger, fewer orders to restaurants. The world shuts down. All of a sudden, it’s all direct to consumer,” Woodward said. “Our orders increased by almost fifty percent overnight… and ShipStation was the way to do that.” Woodward pointed to automation as the biggest ongoing gain: “I would say the automation rules and the rate shopper have been huge efficiency gains for us.”

According to Rimel, the incremental time-saving is the real product, not any single feature. “It’s not one big, simple or single thing that’s going to save you time or money,” he said. “It’s going to be the compilation of all the touch points across your operations and fulfillment where you’re going to claw back that time.” 

The LTL launch, Rimel said, isn’t a placeholder version of the feature, but a fully featured LTL capability in ShipStation.

Madine tied the launch back to where he sees the industry heading over the next decade. “We want to make it very simple for you to manage your workflow and buy transportation,” he said. “We’re going to support it after the fact for you too. Again, that’s the ‘single pane of glass’ philosophy… that’s where I think the industry is going, not just with us, but over the next ten years.” 

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