They get discounted rates from UPS and USPS, keep a small percent of that discount for themselves, and pass the rest of the savings between the discounted rate and full retail rate on to the customer.
I have no relationship with Pirate Ship except that I'm a happy customer. It makes shipping via UPS and USPS easier than using the UPS or USPS sites directly, and it's cheaper. I only wish I'd discovered them sooner.
To give an example of one nice touch on their web site. When entering an address, you can fill out all the annoying individual fields, or you just click "Paste Address" and you get a box where you can paste the full address which it parses into the right fields.
https://support.pirateship.com/en/articles/1860717-how-does-...
They get discounted rates from UPS and USPS, keep a small percent of that discount for themselves, and pass the rest of the savings between the discounted rate and full retail rate on to the customer.
I have no relationship with Pirate Ship except that I'm a happy customer. It makes shipping via UPS and USPS easier than using the UPS or USPS sites directly, and it's cheaper. I only wish I'd discovered them sooner.
To give an example of one nice touch on their web site. When entering an address, you can fill out all the annoying individual fields, or you just click "Paste Address" and you get a box where you can paste the full address which it parses into the right fields.