USPS shipping speed

New “Shippo Rating” Brings You Faster USPS Label-Purchase Performance

Noticed improvements with our USPS rates recently? Shippo now returns USPS rates 90% faster than before!

In line with our mission to provide customers with the best experience finding shipping rates, we’ve eliminated one of the main performance bottlenecks that our customers experience: waiting several seconds for Shippo to return rates during the label-creation process. Returning rates is a time-consuming process because Shippo has to query the shipping carrier’s API to receive rates. If we can eliminate the API call, then we can return rates much more quickly, which is exactly what we’ve done for our domestic USPS rates.

Our solution was to build our own local rating system, called Shippo Rating. We decided to go through the hassle of doing this because the speed improvements to the label purchase workflow have a huge impact on customer experience, especially given that the most used Shippo feature is domestic USPS label purchase. What this ultimately means for our customers is that

Our Shippo Rating system is a big deal for both our team and our customers. One especially important reason for this is that calculating our own rates is a big step forward towards improving the reliability of our system; the less we have to be dependent on other APIs, the less downtime Shippo’s customers will experience. Shippo has always been focused on building more integrations with shipping carriers and e-commerce platforms, and now we are at a point where we can strengthen these integrations by reinforcing our core product, which gives our customers a better label-purchasing experience.

Another huge way the Shippo Rating system benefits our customers is by giving Shippo the ability to provide custom pricing tailored to individual customer’s needs. Moreover, the added flexibility we have with our pricing means that Shippo can start offering discounts for more service levels.

To take advantage of these faster USPS rates, ensure that you have the “Use discounted Shippo rates” setting selected for USPS in your Carriers tab!