How Al’s Sporting Goods outgrew ShipStation and scaled order volume with Shippo API
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Al’s Sporting Goods (Al’s) has been serving athletes and outdoor enthusiasts since 1921, growing from a small local shop in Utah to a premier retailer with a nationwide e-commerce business. As their online sales accelerated, their shipping operations with ShipStation couldn’t keep up. To keep pace with growth, Al’s needed a new shipping solution that was simple, scalable, and seamlessly integrated with their existing systems.
Challenge
As e-commerce orders surged, Al’s Sporting Goods began to feel the strain of their old shipping process. With ShipStation, fulfillment teams across their warehouse and nine retail stores had to manually enter package details and choose a carrier for every single order — an error-prone process that required extensive training. Shipping was one of the hardest jobs in their operations, often taking months for new staff to master.
The problem was clear:
- Slow fulfillment: Shipping 500 orders could take an entire workday
- Long training cycles & high labor costs: It took months before new employees were confident in shipping tasks
- Human error: Manual decision-making often led to incorrect shipping methods, adding unnecessary costs
- Limited scalability: As the business grew, ShipStation’s manual process became a major barrier to keeping up with order volume
“We hit a point where ShipStation just wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t fast enough, and it didn’t scale as we grew,” said Tynan Dutson, the eCommerce Operations Manager at Al’s Sporting Goods.
Solution
Al’s integrated Shippo API directly into Retail Backbone, their ERP and warehouse management system provider. Now, shipping is streamlined and fully automated:
- Shippers simply input package dimensions and weight.
- Retail Backbone communicates with Shippo’s API to instantly select the optimal carrier and service.
- Labels are generated in seconds—without manual decision-making.
The result is a fast, error-free process that makes shipping one of the simplest jobs in the warehouse. “It used to take months to train someone to ship correctly. With Shippo, new hires can be up to speed in just two days,” said Tynan.
Results
“I feel extremely confident that if our volume jumped from 1,000 to 5,000 orders a day, Shippo would handle it without issue. Even if we scaled to a million orders, I trust Shippo to keep things running smoothly.”
— Tynan, Al’s Sporting Goods
50% faster fulfillment
- Before Shippo, shipping 500 orders could take a full 8-hour day.
- With Shippo, the same volume takes less than 4 hours.
Reduced labor and training costs
- Training time dropped from months to two days.
- Employees spend less time shipping, freeing capacity for higher-value tasks.
Error reduction and cost savings
- Automated carrier selection eliminates costly mistakes.
- Lighter packages no longer ship via unnecessarily expensive methods.
Reliability at scale
- A flash sale that generated thousands of orders stress-tested the system just before Black Friday. Shippo handled the surge seamlessly, maintaining 99.99% uptime, giving the team confidence heading into peak season.
Future growth
With Shippo powering shipping, Al’s Sporting Goods is positioned to keep scaling without worrying about bottlenecks. The team is already leveraging Shippo’s analytics beta for deeper visibility into shipping performance, and they’re confident Shippo will continue to support exponential growth.
“Shipping used to be the hardest part of our operation. Now it’s one of the easiest. That’s huge for us.”
— Tynan, Al’s Sporting Goods