2-day shipping won’t save you: 5 foundations for customer loyalty before you speed up

In today’s e-commerce landscape, the pressure to offer faster shipping is stronger than ever. Customers expect speed, and brands are feeling the heat to deliver in two days—or less. But not every product or business benefits from a blanket approach to 2-day shipping.

For some industries, fast shipping isn’t optional—it’s a necessity. Products like frozen goods, temperature-sensitive shipments, or urgent medical supplies require expedited delivery as a core part of their business model. But for many brands, there’s room to be more strategic—optimizing shipping speeds at the SKU level to balance cost and efficiency.

That’s why 2-day shipping alone won’t guarantee customer loyalty. If your fulfillment and shipping operations aren’t optimized, chasing speed can lead to higher costs, operational headaches, and frustrated customers.

Before you start prioritizing speed, it’s essential to first build a strong shipping foundation. These five foundational elements will ensure your operations are cost-effective, efficient, and scalable—so when it’s time to offer faster shipping, you’re doing it in a sustainable way.

Does 2-day shipping really matter for your business?

Not every business benefits from offering 2-day shipping across the board. Before making it a priority, take a data-driven approach to assess whether it actually impacts your bottom line.

How to evaluate if speed is driving customer loyalty

1. Are repurchase rates higher for customers who receive faster shipping?

If customers who get their orders faster are more likely to buy from you again, investing in speed could lead to stronger customer retention.

2. Does faster shipping impact customer lifetime value and churn?

If customers who receive slower shipping tend to churn faster or spend less over time, then faster delivery might be worth prioritizing.

3. Are customers showing a strong preference for speed?

Look at how often customers are choosing expedited shipping when given the option. Are they willing to pay more for speed?

If not, optimizing for cost and reliability—ensuring predictable delivery times without added expenses—might be the better strategy.

4. Do different products require different delivery speeds?

Identify which SKUs benefit most from 2-day delivery versus those that can be shipped at a lower cost without impacting customer satisfaction. A strategic fulfillment approach can help you allocate resources efficiently instead of applying fast shipping across the board.

If your data shows faster shipping isn’t necessarily correlated with more sales, keep reading. However, if your data does show that faster shipping correlates with a boost to your bottom line, then it’s even more critical to get your backend operations in order before speeding up. That’s where these five foundational elements come into play.

Foundation 1: a flexible carrier strategy

Why it matters

A rigid carrier setup can leave you vulnerable to disruptions, cost fluctuations, and capacity issues. If you rely too heavily on a single provider, you lose control over costs, reliability, and fulfillment speed.

What happens without it

• Carrier disruptions can bring fulfillment to a halt if you have no fallback.
• Limited pricing flexibility makes it harder to optimize costs when rates increase.
• Peak season delays become unavoidable if your carrier doesn’t have enough capacity.

How to build it

• Implement a fallback strategy with backup carriers to maintain reliability.
• Use a real-time rate shopping tool to secure cost-effective shipping on every order.
• Maintain flexibility to switch carriers when market conditions change or when opportunities arise to secure volume-based discounts—helping you reduce your total shipping costs without compromising existing rates.

How Shippo can help

• Flip a switch to activate new carriers instantly – Shippo allows businesses to go live with new carriers without long negotiations or complex integrations.
• Access real-time rate comparisons – Compare rates across 40+ carriers, whether using Shippo’s pre-negotiated discounted rates or your own custom rate cards, ensuring you always get the best pricing for your shipments.
• A real-world example: how brands can pivot quickly to optimize shipping costs – When a $350M fashion brand saw sudden market shifts threatening to increase last-mile delivery costs by 10%, they needed a fast, seamless solution. With Shippo, they would be able to:
  
  • Instantly access USPS Ground Advantage for cost-effective final-mile delivery.
  • Transition volume seamlessly with minimal disruption.
  • Run quick cost simulations to understand financial impact before switching.
  • Set up a long-term rate optimization strategy.
  • Read the full story

Foundation 2: real-time transparency for customers

Why it matters

Customers don’t just want fast shipping—93% of consumers want to know where their item is during each step of the delivery process. (source)

What happens without it

• Increased WISMO (Where Is My Order?) inquiries flood your customer support team.
• Even fast deliveries feel slow when customers lack visibility.
• Poor tracking experiences erode trust and reduce repeat purchases.

How to build it

• Offer real-time tracking updates at every stage of the delivery journey.
• Provide proactive alerts for delays, estimated delivery times, and order exceptions.
• Integrate a customer-friendly tracking experience that reduces friction and frustration.

How Shippo can help

• Customization – Brand your own tracking pages and turn them into valuable sales channels by offering additional product recommendations or upcoming promotions.
• Access to 1000+ carriers – Connect with a vast global network of carriers for reliable and accurate tracking data.

Foundation 3: Proactive carrier compliance and relationships

Why it matters

Maintaining carrier relationships and carrier compliance take time and resources to manage—and a lot of it. Falling out of compliance or spending too much time managing these relationships can slow operations, increase costs, and create unnecessary risk.

What happens without it

• Poorly negotiated rates lead to unnecessary costs.
• Compliance issues can result in penalties, service disruptions, or lost carrier partnerships.
• Teams waste time managing carrier policies and operational bottlenecks instead of focusing on business growth.
• Limited escalation support makes it harder to resolve delivery issues quickly.

How to build it

• Businesses can either:
  
  1. Manage carrier negotiations and compliance in-house, which requires dedicated time and resources.
  2. Leverage a shipping platform to access pre-negotiated discounted rates and ensure continuous compliance with carrier requirements.

How Shippo can help

• Carrier compliance expertise – Shippo handled 3,500 hours of compliance management in 2024, ensuring customers stayed ahead of complex regulations.
• Dedicated account management – In 2024, Shippo’s account managers dedicated 8,320 hours to supporting high-volume shippers, helping them avoid operational bottlenecks and optimize their shipping strategies.

Foundation 4: streamlined fulfillment processes

Why it matters

Fast shipping is meaningless if your fulfillment process is slow and inefficient.

What happens without it

• Orders get stuck in fulfillment queues, delaying deliveries.
• Manual processes increase errors, leading to costly reshipments.
• Lack of automation prevents scalability during peak periods.

How to build it

• Integrate fulfillment and shipping systems for a seamless order flow.
• Use bulk label generation to process high-order volumes quickly.
• Optimize warehouse operations:
  
  • Ensure order picking and packing are efficient to avoid fulfillment delays.
  • Use scanning and verification tools to reduce mis-shipments and errors.
  • Implement staging areas for quick carrier pickups to prevent end-of-day backlogs.

How Shippo can help

• Automate bulk labels – Generate thousands of shipping labels in one request, improving speed and reducing manual errors.
• Full flexibility – Tailor workflows to your unique operational needs, ensuring fulfillment efficiency at any scale.
• End-to-end fulfillment management – Integrate directly with your custom systems for full visibility, from order placement to delivery tracking.

Foundation 5: peak season readiness and scalability

Why it matters

Peak season can stress-test your entire operation—if your systems can’t handle demand surges, you’ll risk delays, lost sales, and frustrated customers.

What happens without it

• Order bottlenecks cause slow fulfillment and missed SLAs.
• Carrier capacity issues force last-minute expensive shipping solutions.
• System slowdowns impact label creation and tracking updates.

How to build it

• Stress-test your fulfillment and shipping workflows before peak season.
• Use a shipping platform with proven high-volume scalability to process thousands of shipments per minute.
• Diversify carrier options to avoid peak-season bottlenecks.
• Leverage data to forecast demand and adjust fulfillment strategies in advance.

How Shippo can help

• High-volume scalability – Process 10K+ packages per minute with infrastructure proven to scale 2.4x during traffic surges—no interruptions during peak periods.
• Uninterrupted shipping – In 2024, 153 carrier outages occurred, but Shippo’s API maintained 99.95% uptime, ensuring customers stayed connected and shipments kept moving.

Delivering seamless shipping experiences that keep customers coming back

Fast shipping is only one piece of the puzzle. By focusing on flexibility, transparency, cost-efficiency, fulfillment optimization, and scalability, you set your business up for long-term success.

Shippo provides the tools and infrastructure to help businesses:
✅ Optimize their carrier strategy with access to 40+ carriers and real-time rate shopping.
✅ Offer full transparency with branded tracking pages and proactive delivery updates.
✅ Streamline fulfillment with bulk label generation and direct integrations.
✅ Maintain strong carrier compliance while accessing dedicated account support.
✅ Scale seamlessly—even during peak seasons—with a system built to handle high-volume shipping.

Want to optimize your shipping operations to enable speeding up? Shippo helps brands build these foundations, access discounted rates, and scale effortlessly—so you can deliver not just fast shipping, but great shipping.

Contact an expert today.

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