The Bull Case for Economy Shipping Services

Economy shipping services have a poor reputation. USPS Ground Advantage, UPS Ground Saver and Mail Innovations, FedEx SmartPost and DHL SmartMail all trade transit time for price.

If you’ve used any of these services before, it’s likely you did it to save money.

Which makes sense, because that is what they are designed for. But after some testing you may have decided that it wasn’t worth the savings because of the service degradation and poor customer experience it led to.

While it’s true that these services often have slower shipping speeds and can sometimes have complications during carrier handoff (if applicable), if utilized correctly they often lead to fast shipping times, a great customer experience, AND savings. The tricky part is knowing when to use them and when not to use them.

On the right lanes that trade is smaller than it looks, and sometimes there is no trade at all. Here is how to find those lanes.

What makes an economy service different

First, it’s important to know what these economy services options are and how they differ from more expensive options.

Typically, there’s 3 differences to expect when using one.

1. Parcels shipped with an economy service are almost always on a truck and never on a plane. There are exceptions like shipping toHawaii or Alaska from the lower 48. When shipping long distances, this is obviously slower. When shipping near distances, it often has no impact.

2. Parcels do not receive priority sortation when they get to a sorting center and may be delivered to alternate sorting centers that process packages differently/slower. This means that when sorting centers for carriers are super busy (like peak season) they may be sorted a day or more after they arrive rather than the same day.

3. Economy services from the other carriers hand off to USPS for the final mile.

Generally speaking, economy services from non-USPS carriers are just a middleman between you and USPS Ground Advantage. FedEx, UPS, or DHL will pick it up your packages, but they’re ultimately delivered by the USPS.

These 3 differences are important to keep in mind as we discuss how you can make the most out of economy shipping services to save money and provide a better shipping experience. With that out of the way, how can we now use this knowledge to leverage economy shipping to our best ability?

Where economy and priority converge

The major way we can leverage economy shipping services is to focus on zones where a plane and major sorting center sped doesn’t hold a major advantage for delivery time. This is more common than you think.

Without going into carrier network design, priority shipping options and economy shipping options will frequently share similar delivery estimates for zone 1-4 shipments because the routes and sorting centers in which they pass through will be nearly identical (if not the same).

Another important note is that sorting centers typically sort in waves.

So even if packages arrive from a plane a few hours earlier than they arrive from a truck, they’ll all get processed and move onto their next destination within the same sorting wave.

Plus, priority services will use trucks when shipping to a near zone because the carrier knows air freight poses little advantage.

In these cases, economy and priority options are more similar than people think.

In the lanes I have measured, zone 1-2 economy shipments land in about two business days and zones 3-4 in three to five. Those are observations rather than commitments, and no carrier publishes them as a guarantee — check your own transit data before you price on them.

It is not uncommon to see mid and far zones arrive sooner than the economy service window suggests, as USPS continues to build out its Ground network. Just keep in mind, the more sorting centers your package passes through and the more ground it covers, the more likely economy delays are to happen. In ShipStation, an automation rule that defaults zone 1–3 shipments to an economy service such as Ground Advantage is a reasonable place to start.

Beyond that, you can still see strong success, but more evaluation criteria should be used.

You do not have to work out which lanes those are by hand any more. Put the economy services into a Rate Shopper collection alongside the priority ones, set a transit time threshold that matches what you promised the customer, and the comparison runs per order. On the lanes where economy arrives inside the window it wins on price, and on the lanes where it does not it is filtered out before it can be chosen.

Supplementing your ground services off-peak

The second way you can leverage economy services is by supplementing your UPS Ground or FedEx Ground/Home Delivery shipments during relatively low traffic periods.

Like economy services, UPS Ground and FedEx Ground primarily use ground freight to transport your packages.

The big difference is that these packages aren’t handed off to USPS and typically receive priority during sorting waves. While the lack of handoff and priority sorting can be a big factor during peak season, during low traffic periods the net impact this has on delivery time can be negligible.

Either service option you choose will rely on ground freight and the lack of volume pressure at sorting centers means your packages will likely get sorted the same day.

How to test it without risking peak

If testing economy services during peak sounds too risky, test them over the summer, May to September, while network volume is low.

The test itself is now a configuration rather than a spreadsheet. Add the economy services to a rate shopper collection, set the transit threshold to your delivery promise, and let it run on real orders for a few weeks. You are not predicting which lanes work — you are letting the carrier’s own transit estimates and rates decide per shipment, and then reading what actually happened.

Watch two things while it runs. How often an economy service won, which tells you whether this is worth anything on your mix. And how often deliveries landed inside the window you promised, which is the part a rate comparison cannot tell you in advance.

On the order profiles I have tested this on, sub-5lb shipments across zones 1-4 came out meaningfully cheaper at comparable delivery times. Heavier shipments save less, and Ground Advantage stops being the obvious answer as weight climbs.

Don’t hard-code the answer

The instinct is to take what the test showed you and write it into automation rules: economy under this weight to these zones, priority otherwise. That was the only option for a long time and it is the wrong one now.

Rules are static. They hold the answer that was true on the day you measured, and economy transit is exactly the thing that has been moving — the whole argument of this post is that these services got better while their reputation did not. A rule freezes a moving target and gives you no signal when it drifts.

Leave the comparison live instead. The rate shopper you tested with is the thing you keep: the collection holds every service you would accept, the transit threshold holds your promise, and the answer re-derives itself on every order as rates and transit times change.

One thing the threshold does not cover. A transit filter runs on the carrier’s delivery estimate, and an estimate is not a guarantee — the two are different commitments and the distinction does not follow the line people expect. For orders sold on a date rather than a price, that matters.