Actionable insights and inspiration for eCommerce merchants and marketers

Elevate your eCommerce game with expert tips, data insights, and inspiration from the best in the business. This blog is your resource for thriving in an omnichannel world, retaining more customers, and mastering the post-purchase experience.

Top Parcel Consolidation Software for 3PLs & Retailers in 2026

You've been told the answer to rising shipping costs is parcel consolidation. But before you re-engineer your pack stations, ask what that really costs you: the added sorting labor, the workflow changes, and the delay risk when one order in a consolidated box gets held. There's a way to lower cost-per-shipment in 2026 that doesn't touch your warehouse layout. That way is carrier portfolio optimization: choosing the most economical carrier and service for every shipment from one platform, instea

Eugene Oh September 23, 2026

Which Tracking API is Best? The Developer's Guide for 2026

Your on-call engineer was just paged at 3 AM. The tracking API you rely on is down again, and thousands of 'Where Is My Order?' tickets are flooding your support desk. The root cause of most post-purchase pain is an unreliable, poorly documented API rather than a missing feature. The tracking API you can build on wins on three things a skeptical developer can verify - uptime you can hold a vendor to, webhook delivery that retries instead of giving up, and documentation that gets you to productio

Mike Fazio September 23, 2026

Tired of the UPS Tracking Page? Here Are Better Alternatives

Why the Default UPS Tracking Page Is Failing Your Brand Your brand is nowhere in sight, the status reads 'In Transit: Departed from Facility,' and the only next step the page offers is a UPS account - not a way back to you. Your customer clicked "Track My Order" in your shipping email and landed on ups.com. For a Shopify brand shipping 1,000 to 20,000 orders a month, that page turns a simple delivery question into a support ticket and hands the post-purchase moment to the carrier. The best UPS

Eugene Oh September 23, 2026

5 Best ShipTheory Alternatives for UK & EU eCommerce Brands

The renewal notice is in. Customer service spends its day answering order-status questions, marketing wants the post-checkout experience to look like the brand, and finance still cannot see which carrier earns its rate. Your brand has outgrown a tool whose job ends when the label prints. The real gap sits between four disconnected systems and one shared data layer. This guide ranks five ShipTheory alternatives on how well each one closes that gap, for UK and EU brands shipping 1,000 to 50,000 o

Eugene Oh September 23, 2026

Recent articles

How to calculate volumetric or dimentional weight

What is volumetric weight Volumetric weight is also called dimensional weight, which is calculated from length, width and height with a volumetric divisor. Each courier can have a different volumetric divisor for calculating volumetric weight. Below you can find the volumetric weight formula or also called dim weight factor. What is volumetric weight calculation formula Each courier may have a different volumetric weight calculation, below are the formula FedEx and UPS calculate volumetric we

Teddy Chan January 22, 2016

What is Address Validation? Does Postmen support it?

Postmen API does not support address validation for now as we are still focusing on integrating more carriers for label printing and rates calculation. In this post, I am going to tell you different options for address validation in the market that you can choose from. What is address validation? To be precise, address validation is also called address verification, address suggestion or address correction. In general, it refers to Street-level address validation which returns single or multipl

Teddy Chan December 17, 2015

Shipping labels 102 - paper size, label format and printer choices

Fulfillment Wednesday today will tell you how to setup your printer, and what label size and format you should choose when printing electronic shipping labels (i.e. online labels) with thermal printers and desktop printers. Label paper sizes & Printer Type In general there are** 2 different paper sizes** for shipping labels: Paper SizePrinter TypeCourier 4" x 6" Thermal printerUPS, DHL, FedEx, USPS, Royal Mail 8" x 11.5" (~A4)Laser or inkjet printerAll couriers Basically 4x6 paper size

Teddy Chan December 16, 2015

Shipping labels 101 - 3 ways to create shipping labels online

Fulfillment Wednesday yeah - it is my favorite day as I got to learn what matters for an online retailer shipping an order. Today I will go through different options of creating shipping labels online. What are shipping labels Shipping labels basically detail the delivery information like ship from, ship to, package description, dimension, weight, customs, billing info. Shipping labels are also called waybill or consignment note depending on the shipping company. Usually the courier has a sp

Teddy Chan December 09, 2015

Product Updates

English translation for China Post and China EMS tracking

It has been a while since we wrote about AfterShip features (sorry for being lazy on marketing ;). We now switch to ghost [https://ghost.org/] platform for our blog and hopefully forcing ourselves to write more. While we grow our team to now 23 people (in which 21 are developers), the team has been working hard to rewrite AfterShip API [https://www.aftership.com/] and upgrade to v5. We have learned a lot in the last 3 years and it is time to clean up the codes and make the system more scalable.

Teddy Chan November 30, 2015

What is manifest, end of day form, scan form?

Today is fulfillment wednesday, which I will go through issues, questions or topics we came across when shipping. Today's topic is manifest, which is also called end of day form or scan form for some carriers. What is manifest? Manifest is sort of a confirmation list of shipments that you're going to ship that day. In general, carriers require shippers to print out a manifest form at the end of the day and pass to the carrier - which carrier will verify the list of shipments. Some carriers a

Teddy Chan November 25, 2015

Get the week's best eCommerce content

Tips, tricks, and eCommerce inspiration from the industry’s top experts.