Cheaper overnight shipping for perishables

Overnight rates for food that cannot wait

Cheap overnight shipping for perishables is a narrow problem. The box has to be at the customer the next morning, the product is losing time, and the insulated carton is large for its weight. UPS Next Day Air and FedEx Priority Overnight solve the clock. They are also the lines that dominate the invoice.

This page is the hub for that job. Seafood, meat, frozen food, bakery, flowers, and dry ice each have their own packing rules, and they are linked below. The rate question is the same on all of them: what does this overnight box cost on our account versus the account you use now.

Why insulated boxes cost more than the food inside

A cooler, gel packs, or a foam shipper adds inches faster than it adds pounds. Carriers bill the greater of scale weight and dimensional weight. A 10-pound seafood box that measures like a 20-pound box is billed as the larger one. Shrinking the outer carton, without starving the coolant, is often worth more than another point off the base rate.

Measure the carton you actually tender, not the product. Length, width, and height in inches, plus scale weight. We need both. A quote from product weight alone will not match the invoice.

Cutoffs, Saturday, and the service you must keep

• UPS Next Day Air and FedEx Priority Overnight are the services most perishable shippers are already buying. We price those services, not a slower substitute.
• Pickup cutoff decides whether 'overnight' is tomorrow or the day after. A cheaper label that misses the cutoff is a refused delivery.
• Saturday delivery is a separate choice. If your customers expect Saturday, say so. We do not drop it to make a comparison look cheaper.
• 2-day air can be the right product when the pack-out and the coolant support it. It is the wrong product when the food will not hold. See 2-day air before you switch a lane.

Who we compare rates for

Seafood plants, meat and butcher shippers, frozen food brands, bakeries sending bread and pastry, and florists on overnight lanes. Packaging notes for each sit on the industry pages: seafood, meat, frozen food, bakery, flowers, and dry ice.

We do not invent a sample lane for 'a box of salmon.' The one real overnight figure published here is a 10 lb UPS Next Day Air shipment, New York to Los Angeles, 10 inch cube: $35.75 before, $16.78 after. Your cooler will not match that cube. Send the invoice.

How an overnight perishable review is different

We refuse rows that are not overnight. A perishable shipper's file often includes a Ground wholesale lane and an overnight gift lane. Averaging them produces a number nobody pays. The overnight page is only the overnight rows.

Cooler dimensions get checked against billed weight. When dimensional weight is higher than scale weight on most rows, the conversation turns to the outer carton before it turns to the account. A smaller cooler that still holds the coolant is a real saving. A smaller cooler that arrives warm is not.

Cutoff time is part of the rate. If your pack-out finishes after the UPS or FedEx pickup, the label you want does not exist that day. Tell us the pickup you actually make, not the one on the carrier's national chart.

Saturday is its own column. Florists and bakeries feel this hardest, and seafood does too when the customer is a weekend restaurant. If Saturday is in the offer, it stays in the comparison.

How it works

1. Send a recent UPS or FedEx invoice, or a shipment export with ZIP codes, service, weight, dimensions and charges.
2. We compare the same packages and the same service. The price you see is the label price.
3. If the numbers work, you ship with UPS or FedEx on our account. Our fee is one cent per label, already included. There is no monthly fee and no contract.

What you pay us

The Shipping Savers fee is $0.01 per purchased label. It is already inside the price on the label. We do not add a monthly membership. Carrier charges, residential fees, fuel, delivery-area fees and other accessorials are part of that label price, not a second bill from us. Read the pricing page for the full explanation.

The only published before-and-after figure on this site is one real shipment: a 10 lb UPS Next Day Air package, 10 × 10 × 10 inches, New York to Los Angeles. It was $35.75 before and $16.78 with The Shipping Savers. That is not a rate for your lane. Your price comes from your own file.

Shopify and ShipStation

You can keep the software you already use to take orders. Shopify stays the store. ShipStation can stay the place where the team buys labels. On ShipStation, our Chrome add-on shows the rate next to the order, including when the order uses third-party billing. See discounted rates inside ShipStation and Shopify shipping rates.

Questions