How to drive business impact with shipping insights and analytics

How to drive business impact with shipping insights and analytics

Having the tools in place to make sense of your shipping data isn’t just useful—it’s necessary. Data powers strategic decision-making, and businesses gain a significant competitive edge when they turn data into actionable insights.

The best shipping analytics solutions provide the data your business needs and when and how you need it. This allows you to track metrics, spot trends, manage costs, improve efficiency, surface new opportunities, and enhance the customer experience.

For enterprise-level operations, this means having a clear view of your entire shipping operation—from order volume and fulfillment to support costs and delivery performance across carriers.

ShipStation shares some of the ways you can use an analytics solution to centralize your data, understand your shipping performance at a deeper level, and improve your business with smart decisions.

Reduce shipping costs

Shipping is one of the largest operational expenses for online businesses, which makes controlling costs so critical. With analytics, merchants can find cost-saving opportunities across multiple areas of the shipping process.

This visibility makes it easier to identify patterns like:

• Which carriers are consistently more expensive than others.
• Whether expedited shipping is being overused or not.
• How dimensional weight and package sizes could be unnecessarily driving up costs.
• What products and categories have disproportionately high return rates.
• What categories of items are frequently damaged in transit.

By acting on these insights, merchants can track carrier commitments, negotiate stronger carrier rates, cut support needs, refine packaging strategies, make returns manageable, and select the most cost-effective shipping options without sacrificing delivery speed.

Enhance the customer experience

Late deliveries and unexpected shipping costs are among the top reasons customers abandon carts or churn. Even more striking, a ShipStation report examining April 2025 data found 69% of consumers would switch brands for more convenient delivery or return options—a 25% increase from November 2024.

Shipping analytics let merchants monitor delivery performance, so they can:

• Spot recurring delays in specific regions or with specific carriers.
• Proactively notify customers of potential delays to set proper expectations.
• Offer accurate, real-time delivery estimates based on historical data to reduce customer anxiety and support inquiries like “Where’s my order?”
• Ensure staffing schedules are aligned with demand and service teams are prepared to respond to more customer support requests.
• Personalize shipping options by tailoring checkout options based on customer preferences.
• Process refunds and exchanges fast to leave customers feeling cared for, even after a negative experience.

This proactive approach builds trust and loyalty—turning shipping from a source of frustration into a brand differentiator and giving merchants the confidence to advertise reliability as part of the brand promise.

Solve for operational inefficiencies

Shipping data doesn’t just live in logistics—it connects to inventory, fulfillment, and returns. Reporting tools can show merchants where they can streamline shipping operations, such as:

• Identifying warehouses that consistently ship faster or slower.
• Analyzing order weight and size trends to optimize packaging sizes and materials.
• Routing shipments more strategically by carrier and region.
• Fixing slowdowns caused by label generation delays, manual data entry errors, or missed carrier pickups.
• Adjusting packaging sizes to lower shipping spend, less waste, and faster packing times.
• Where to position warehouses and fulfillment centers to get closer to areas of high demand and decrease transit times.

The result is a leaner, faster workflow that runs with fewer errors, lower overhead, and delivers more efficiently.

Forecast and plan more strategically

Historical shipping data provides valuable context for building for the future, giving merchants a data-driven approach to predict and prepare for what’s next. Reviewing past results helps businesses with:

• Projecting and preparing for higher demand around key events and scaling up labor and warehouse space to avoid overtime costs and processing delays.
• Budgeting for spikes in holiday and seasonal shipping costs during peak seasons.
• Helping finance teams adjust pricing to maintain healthy margins.
• Uncovering opportunities to expand market share and launch targeted marketing campaigns in regions primed for growth.

This data not only reduces last-minute surprises but also helps surface patterns and blind spots and creates a roadmap for long-term growth.

The added benefits of shipping analytics via API for enterprise businesses

Too many large companies rely on a mix of static reports, manual processes, and custom tools to make sense of their shipping data, but struggle to analyze performance at scale and with ease.

Some merchants choose to stitch together data sets or build their own analytics tools using a CDP or business intelligence platform. Others rely on limited and siloed data from various tools in their stack or simply operate without the ability to compare performance across carriers.

Data is only valuable when you act on it

A powerful yet easy-to-use analytics and reporting solution is a lever for growth. Shipping data can be a goldmine, no matter what size your business, and by tapping into it, you can make smarter decisions that improve margins, optimize operations, delight customers, and strengthen your competitive edge.

The question isn’t whether or not to use shipping analytics—it’s how fast and effectively you can start putting your data to work.

This story was produced by ShipStation and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.