Shipping Software for Ecommerce Fulfillment: The Next Generation of Shipping Simplified

Ecommerce has transformed the way people shop, but behind every seamless online purchase is a complex fulfillment operation. As consumer expectations for fast and affordable shipping continue to rise, merchants face increasing pressure to optimize their logistics. Managing inventory across multiple warehouses, coordinating with various carriers, and ensuring accurate, on-time deliveries, all while keeping costs low has become a daunting challenge.

Legacy shipping software was built for a simpler time when most businesses operated from a single warehouse and fulfilled orders through a few standardized shipping methods. But today’s ecommerce landscape is far more dynamic. Merchants must navigate multi-channel sales, distributed fulfillment networks, and ever-changing carrier rates, all while maintaining a smooth customer experience. Unfortunately, traditional shipping software often falls short, forcing businesses to rely on manual workarounds that are inefficient, error-prone, and costly.

Next-generation shipping software changes everything. By leveraging intelligent automation, real-time decision-making, and deep integration with fulfillment networks, modern shipping solutions eliminate the complexity of ecommerce logistics. These systems optimize order routing, reduce shipping costs, and ensure seamless fulfillment—without the need for endless configuration or constant oversight.

In this article, we’ll explore the major ways next-generation shipping software simplifies ecommerce fulfillment, highlighting how it outperforms legacy systems in efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. Whether you’re a growing merchant or an established seller looking to streamline your operations, the future of shipping is here—and it’s built for success.

What is Ecommerce Shipping Software?

Ecommerce shipping software is a specialized technology solution designed to streamline and optimize the shipping process for online businesses. Its primary purpose is to help ecommerce businesses manage their shipping operations efficiently, reduce shipping costs, and improve customer satisfaction. By integrating with ecommerce platforms, inventory management systems, and shipping carriers, ecommerce shipping software provides a seamless and automated shipping experience. This integration ensures that orders are processed quickly and accurately, inventory levels are synchronized, and customers receive their purchases on time, enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

Benefits and Key Features

The benefits of using ecommerce shipping software are manyfold. Firstly, it significantly reduces shipping costs by enabling businesses to compare real-time rates from multiple carriers and choose the most cost-effective option. This not only saves money but also ensures that customers receive their orders promptly. Improved customer satisfaction is another major benefit, as the software automates many aspects of the shipping process, reducing errors and delays.

Key features of ecommerce shipping software include real-time rate comparison, which allows businesses to find the best shipping rates instantly. Automated label printing streamlines the shipping process, saving time and reducing the risk of errors. Inventory management features help keep track of stock levels across multiple warehouses, ensuring that products are always available when needed. Order tracking provides customers with real-time updates on their shipments, enhancing their shopping experience.

Additionally, ecommerce shipping software supports international shipping, making it easier for businesses to expand their reach globally. The software often provides exclusive shipping discounts, further reducing shipping expenses. Multi-carrier support and integration with multiple sales channels ensure that businesses can manage all their shipping needs from a single platform, improving efficiency and supply chain visibility.

Simplifying Operations: Making Today’s Complex Ecommerce Effortless

Based on original research we’ve conducted, a merchant seeking to cover the continental US (the lower 48 states) with affordable 2-day ground shipping requires inventory to be positioned in 4 strategically located warehouses. If they’re seeking to achieve 1-day delivery, that number rises to 9 fulfillment centers.

As the number of sales channels and warehouses increases, the operational complexity increases exponentially. Legacy shipping software was built for the old world, where fulfilling orders from just a single warehouse location was the norm. It was never built to handle the complexities of distributed fulfillment. Too many things at the core of the software would have to change to elegantly handle distributed fulfillment. This means merchants often try to get by with complex, convoluted workarounds that keep breaking. However, effective inventory management and synchronization can be achieved through the use of advanced fulfillment software, which streamlines operations, enhances accuracy, and addresses common challenges in the fulfillment lifecycle.

Today’s multi-warehouse, multi-channel environment creates many problem areas for Sellers to manage: 

• When inventory is spread across such a large number of warehouses, which location should each order be routed to (you can’t draw a line down the middle of a map and expect to get the best shipping rate)? 
• Distributed fulfillment offers possibilities if there are problems at any one warehouse location – such as receiving orders after the cut-off time, running out of inventory, or inclement weather. How can software make identifying such exceptions and rerouting them easier?
• How can fulfillment be handled across multiple sales channels while ensuring a consistent, cohesive experience for customers?
• Can the system natively integrate with best-in-class fulfillment networks to unify your logistics technology and operations?
• With ecommerce growing all the time, online shoppers are sharing more sensitive data than ever. With an increased consumer demand for privacy protection, how does your shipping software keep personal information secure?  

We’ll now take a look at each of these, examining the differences in the way legacy and next-generation ecommerce shipping software handle them.

Automatic Order Routing and Label Generation

Legacy Software – Crude and Primitive Routing

Many of today’s popular legacy software have automated order routing features. However, do not be fooled—these capabilities are limited and prone to error, especially when handling diverse shipping options. 

In systems like ShipStation, a “Ship From” location can be set based on specified criteria – such as the SKU ordered or the customer’s address. However, a large number of clunky automation rules have to be written – for example, writing a rule to have all orders from West Coast customers be shipped from your California warehouse. Similar rules mapping other states to respective fulfillment locations have to be manually written. Similarly, if you have certain SKUs available only in specific locations, you need to write rules to assign orders accordingly. 

Creating such a large number of automation rules is an error-prone, painful process for many reasons. Here are a few of them:

• So much to configure. Merchants need to ensure they’ve captured every business process through a rule. If they forget to set up any rule (quite possible, given the high levels of operational complexity today), it can create problems and cost leakages. Even the simplest of workflows require rules to be defined. For example, imagine that you wish to use only certain carrier services to make deliveries to residential addresses. Even in that case, you need to define automation rules mapping the address type to appropriate services. 

• You’re guessing and hoping. Because your rules are manually defined by mapping SKUs or customer addresses to fulfillment locations, there could always be cases where the rules don’t make the most optimal decision. Without doing a deep, time-consuming manual investigation, you’ll never be able to actually tell.
• Requires constant maintenance. Rules become obsolete when carriers change or update their services. For example, when USPS introduced Ground Advantage, your rules didn’t automatically update to factor in the new service. This means you had to spend hours updating and rewriting them.

Slow process. Sellers don’t feel comfortable beginning shipping with the software until they’re confident they’ve captured all of their processes through automation rules. This delays go-live, ultimately increasing your time to value.

Next-Gen Software – Intelligent, Powerful Routing Technology

Cahoot’s next-generation shipping software comes with end-to-end intelligent automation. When you receive an order, the system intelligently compares multiple warehouse locations, inventory levels, carriers, and shipping services to pick the cheapest label that will meet the delivery SLA committed to the customer. In this way, the Cahoot shipping management software takes the thinking and error out of the rate shopping process, always providing the optimal shipping label, and improves shipping speed because it takes actual estimated real-time delivery date into account based on ship date and day of the week.

With our technology, you won’t face the automation problems that we’ve highlighted with legacy software. Our intelligent order routing capabilities provide Sellers with many benefits: 

• Nothing to configure – it just works. You don’t need to spend time worrying whether you’ve captured all your business workflows through automation rules. You don’t have to update rules and make sure they’re all compatible when business needs change. Cahoot factors in all variables like shipping services, warehouse locations, and inventory levels to pick the optimum fulfillment location on every order automatically. 
• Based on the lowest cost, no more guessing. There’s no need to worry about whether your automations have been configured correctly to truly pick the best location every time. You can rest assured knowing that the decision is in the hands of technology, which makes the right choice for every order.
• No maintenance. The system automatically factors in any changes that carriers make to their services. There are no hand-written automation rules to update or overwrite. When new services like Ground Advantage are launched, the system factors in this additional information, and continues to automatically route orders correctly.
• Ready-to-go. Sellers can begin shipping in days or weeks with our software, not months. There’s no need to spend time wondering whether you’ve captured workflows through elaborate automations. This means you’ll be able to go live faster and shorten your time to value.

Multi-Warehouse Exception Handling with Multi-Carrier Shipping Software

Legacy Software – Limited Rerouting Capability

With legacy software, it’s difficult to plan for the unexpected. Let’s imagine you have 2 warehouses – one in Chicago, and the other in Southern California. Suppose a blizzard strikes the Chicago location. 

When working with legacy systems, you don’t have an easy way to temporarily suspend locations. All you’re looking for is a way to temporarily put fulfillment from your Chicago location on hold, while you wait for the weather to improve. 

In legacy systems like ShipStation, each SKU is mapped to a list of warehouses from where it can be shipped. You will need to update this mapping between SKUs and fulfillment locations to stop fulfillment from one of your warehouses. This is a painful workaround that you have to perform for a very short period of time – once the weather improves, you’ll have to repeat the process to restore the original configuration. 

All this adds to what is already a stressful time, making it difficult for your business to quickly adjust to, and recover from unexpected events. Robust shipping software solutions can help manage these exceptions more effectively, ensuring smoother operations and better customer service.

Next Gen Software – Agile, Flexible Order Rerouting

With Cahoot’s next-generation shipping software, adverse events don’t have to mean disaster for your business. If one of your fulfillment locations goes down, you can quickly toggle it off. The system will automate shipping from the remaining available locations, helping you keep your customer promises and continue selling.

There are other scenarios when you might require intelligent exception management which need not be emergencies. For example, if one of your warehouse locations needs to close for a holiday, the system can exclude that location and continue to simplify shipping for you across the other active locations.

There are no automations to undo or rewrite. You don’t have to spend a lot of time restoring your system to its original system once the affected location is back up and running again – it’s just a simple toggle to flip on and off. This ensures that your business can continue operating smoothly during such events, and quickly recover from them with minimal impact. 

Multichannel Capabilities

Legacy Software – Many Integrations, but of What Value?

One advantage that legacy software has by virtue of having been around for a longer time is its long list of integrations. These tools, such as ShipStation, Shipwise (formerly DesktopShipper), and ShippingEasy all have a long list of integrations with shopping cart platforms, online marketplaces, and other tools that ecommerce Sellers use. 

However, while this is definitely a positive, we think this is a case of winning the battle but losing the war. In the above sections, you’ve seen some of the limitations of these tools (keep reading to see more deficiencies), and how they can hamper your productivity and hurt your costs on every single order. You might save a little time with out-of-the-box integrations to more platforms, but does it really matter if these tools negatively impact your bottom line? 

Next-Gen Software – All the Integrations You’re Used To

Cahoot’s next-generation shipping software is tightly integrated with all leading online marketplaces and shopping cart platforms, including Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, eBay, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento 2). We’re also integrated with all leading shipping carriers and ecommerce tools that Sellers use today. Our ecommerce shipping solution provides robust integrations that streamline rate shopping, label creation, and order tracking, making shipping more efficient and cost effective for businesses of all sizes.

What really matters is the depth of integration between the channel and your shipping software. A simple integration may fetch orders from Shopify or Amazon into your shipping software, but fail to sync inventory or push back tracking information. With our integrations, Cahoot automatically fetches all information required to fulfill an order from the sales channel and intelligently pushes tracking information back to the channel. We also maintain an inventory sync, ensuring that you won’t accept orders on out-of-stock items, preventing overselling. The system also provides you with color-coded alerts to quickly alert you to dipping inventory levels, enabling timely, proactive replenishment rather than reacting to customer frustration on canceled orders.

While our list of integrations might be comparatively smaller (but growing!), you won’t feel the difference – our API allows you to connect Cahoot with any other system you’re using. And as we’ve highlighted in the above sections (keep reading for more!), the system offers real cost savings and productivity gains on every single order.

Integration With Fulfillment Networks

Legacy Software – Cobbled Together and Disjointed

Legacy ecommerce shipping software works well if you’re fulfilling a small number of orders from your own warehouse location. However, if you’re partnering with multiple 3PLs, have a combination of in-house and outsourced fulfillment, or are working with order fulfillment networks, cracks start to emerge. This stems from legacy software’s lack of native integration with fulfillment networks. Selecting the right shipping solution that seamlessly connects all fulfillment nodes is crucial for efficient order fulfillment and handoff to multiple carriers.

With tools like Flexport, you can’t expand nationwide coverage through their network while still running your own operations. For example – what if you wish to fulfill certain orders from your own warehouses if you have inventory and rates are cheaper? Flexport seeks to capture all volume even if it is inefficient to do so because they don’t integrate with all your fulfillment nodes. Many legacy software have a similar problem, where they find it difficult to manage a combination of in-house and outsourced fulfillment. Rather than the system intelligently identifying which orders need to be outsourced, the Seller has to define this – which is time-consuming and error-prone.

Other forms of chaos can emerge when you’re trying to force a legacy shipping software and 3PL vendor (like Flexe, for example) to work together. The 3PL might require you to figure out which orders you’re going to ship with them, generate a file with all that information, and send it over to them. If you’re trying to participate in a program like Seller Fulfilled Prime, you have tight cut-off times and very little room to maneuver. Imagine scrambling in the limited time you have between the cutoff time and the carrier pickup to collate and send over the information. You have to hope and pray that you haven’t made a mistake and that you’ve sent the information in time for your 3PL to process the shipments. 

Lastly, let’s imagine a scenario where you’ve partnered with multiple 3PLs to achieve nationwide coverage. You have to either use the shipping software to print labels manually and hand that over to each of the 3PLs or share your credentials with all of them. This increases the number of parties your carrier credentials go to, increasing risk and vulnerability for your business.

If you’re experiencing some of these frustrations and want to migrate from your existing fulfillment partner, we know that it’s easier said than done. The process can be uncertain, confusing, and stressful for your business. We’ve put together a step-by-step guide to help you make the switch from one fulfillment partner to another, which you can read here!

Next-Gen Software – Natively Integrated

Cahoot’s shipping software is tightly integrated with our order fulfillment network (having over 100 warehouses in the US). The system is also flexible enough to accommodate any fulfillment locations you run your own operations from – making handling scenarios where there is a combination of in-house and outsourced fulfillment easy to manage. In such cases, the system is able to intelligently and automatically identify the orders where fulfillment is cheaper through outsourcing rather than being handled at your own warehouse. This frees up your time and ensures you’re getting the best deal on every order.

You also don’t need to spend time acting as the middleman between your shipping software and 3PL, where you drown in busy work generating files and handing them over to your fulfillment partner. With Cahoot, your fulfillment partners see all orders instantly and can print labels in one click. This agility and simplified workflow are just two of the reasons that help Sellers using our fulfillment network meet and surpass the challenging cut-off times and demanding performance metrics that Amazon expects them to meet on Seller Fulfilled Prime. 

It’s not just SFP where requirements are challenging. On the Walmart marketplace, merchants hoping to see increased conversion and sales must offer free nationwide 2-day delivery with over 95% of orders expected to reach customers by the promised time. 

And while you may scale to use many warehouses on the Cahoot network, none of our fulfillment partners know your carrier credentials – you share that only with us on the platform. This reduces risk and keeps your credentials safe while scaling nationwide fulfillment for you.

Information Security and Data Protection

Legacy Software – Poor Security and Privacy

Legacy ecommerce shipping software provides minimal data protection measures. Everything is fine if you own your own warehouses and are using these tools to fulfill orders. However, if you’re partnering with a 3PL (and they use legacy tools to process orders), you’ve handed over all your brand and customer data to them. 

While you may sign agreements to prevent misuse, personally identifiable information about your customers (full name, address, email) and proprietary business data is openly available to your 3PL. While they may operate with good intentions, your confidential data is now at the mercy of their information security practices. 

This increases the risk and exposure for your business, with little safeguards in place to protect sensitive information.

Next Gen Software – Robust Data Protection and Governance

With next-generation shipping software, we ensure that only the essential information needed for order fulfillment is transmitted to Cahoot warehouses. We hold back or redact other information – for example, even on a shipping label, your fulfillment partner sees only the first initial of the customer’s last name – making it difficult for them to reconstruct personal customer data. And no data is copy/pasteable or exportable!

We also keep non-essential customer, brand, and product information walled off and accessible only to you. This ensures that your data is secure and accessible to only one party – you. 

The Future of Fulfillment is Here

Ecommerce logistics have evolved beyond the limitations of legacy shipping software. Today’s merchants need solutions that don’t just patch problems with complex rules and manual oversight but instead offer true automation, intelligence, and flexibility. The challenges of distributed fulfillment, multi-channel sales, and increasing customer expectations demand technology that works for you—not against you.

Cahoot’s next-generation shipping software isn’t just an upgrade; it’s a transformation. With intelligent automation, seamless integrations, and built-in security, our system ensures that fulfillment is fast, cost-effective, and effortlessly scalable. From real-time order routing to automated packaging selection, every feature is designed to help you save time, reduce costs, and focus on growing your business rather than troubleshooting logistics.

The days of clunky, error-prone software are over. The future belongs to merchants who embrace smarter, more efficient fulfillment—where technology does the heavy lifting, and businesses thrive. It’s time to leave behind outdated systems and step into a world where shipping works smarter, not harder.

Are you ready to experience the future of ecommerce fulfillment? The next generation of shipping starts now. If you’d like to learn more, check out our Next Generation Shipping Software Guide, Part 3: “Next-Gen Warehouse Automation Software for Ecommerce: Fulfillment Efficiency”.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who uses shipping software?

Shipping software has features that can benefit various clients, including individual Sellers, ecommerce brands, retailers, and courier service providers. Feature-rich software like Cahoot is autonomous and makes highly intelligent and scalable fulfillment and shipping accessible to retailers and brands of all sizes.

What is fulfillment optimization?

Fulfillment optimization is the process of determining the best options for sourcing and order fulfillment, which results in more efficient use of inventory and reduced costs.

What is a shipping platform?

A shipping platform helps you ship faster and cost-effectively by organizing orders, offering pre-negotiated shipping rates, enabling shipping rate comparison, and managing shipping workflow. 

Who uses shipping software?

Shipping software has features that can benefit various clients, including individual Sellers, ecommerce brands, retailers, and courier service providers. Feature-rich software like Cahoot is autonomous and makes highly intelligent and scalable fulfillment and shipping accessible to retailers and brands of all sizes.

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