Side-by-side comparison

Pricing: per-label fees are the hidden cost in Shippo

Shippo's headline price is competitive — the Starter plan begins around $19/month. The catch is the per-label fee charged on top of the subscription on the lower tiers. At Starter, every label you print adds a small fee that scales with volume. A store generating 1,000 labels per month can quietly double the bill once the per-label charge is rolled up.

Higher Shippo tiers (Professional and above) reduce or remove the per-label fee but step up the monthly subscription substantially. Either way, the spend tracks with your shipping volume.

ShipLab is flat. The base subscription is $5/month, and each active carrier you connect adds $7/month. A typical DTC store running DHL Express and UPS — whether based in the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, or anywhere else with carrier coverage — lands at $5 + $7 + $7 = $19/month all-in, regardless of whether you print 50 or 5,000 labels in that month. Overage on storage is capped at $100/month for safety, so the worst-case bill is bounded.

For high-volume stores, the math gets dramatic. A merchant printing 3,000 labels per month on Shippo Starter pays the subscription plus thousands of dollars in per-label fees. The same workload on ShipLab costs the same flat $19.

Geographic focus: Shippo built for US-domestic, ShipLab built for any UPS / DHL / Canada Post merchant

Shippo grew up on USPS. Its default carrier network, label flow, and address validation are tuned for US merchants. The interface speaks in pounds and inches, "ship-from" defaults to ZIP code, and many of the most polished features — Scan Forms, USPS Cubic, the US Returns API — only make sense inside the US.

International shipping with Shippo works, but the depth shows. Customs forms are basic, EORI is a single account field, and DHL Express features like Paperless Trade rely on whatever defaults DHL applies after you hand off the shipment.

ShipLab is built the other way around. UPS, DHL Express, and Canada Post are first-class citizens — used for the international leg and for domestic shipping in every country those carriers serve (US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Australia, and dozens more on UPS and DHL alone). Every customs field can be set per direction (export, import, return) and per destination country, with cascading defaults so you configure once and override only where needed. Whether you ship US-to-EU, UK-to-US, or domestically within Canada, that depth translates into fewer customs holds and fewer manual edits.

The condition builder makes shipping rules feel like Magento again

Shippo's automation rules are productive but linear: pick a trigger, pick an action, save. For straightforward stores ("if order weighs over 2kg, use UPS Ground") that is enough. For real-world DTC logic it gets brittle quickly.

ShipLab ships with a Magento-style condition builder — the same nested rule engine merchants know from Magento's Cart Price Rules and Shipping Method Conditions:

• Nested AND / OR groups at any depth.
• Conditions on weight, cart total, destination country, EU vs non-EU, SKU, product ID, variant ID, custom Shopify attributes.
• Product subselection: rule fires only when at least one cart item matches a sub-rule (e.g., contains a fragile category or a regulated SKU).
• Schedule conditions: enable a rule only on certain weekdays or time windows.
• Price actions: percentage of carrier rate, fixed surcharge, flat override, conditional free shipping threshold.

For Magento merchants moving to Shopify, this is the rule engine you already know how to use. The mental model maps almost one-to-one.

Cross-border customs: ShipLab is deeper than Shippo

Both apps generate customs forms for international shipments. The difference is what happens inside the form.

Shippo treats EORI and VAT as a single value on the account. If you have to ship under different fiscal identities — for example a separate Italian VAT for fiscal representation alongside your US-side or UK-side EORI — you are wrestling the data into individual shipments by hand. DHL Paperless Trade goes through whatever DHL has on file by default.

ShipLab uses a three-level cascading scope: default → direction → destination country. Set a default EORI, VAT, or any other tax identifier; override only for the countries that need a local identity; leave the rest inheriting. DHL Paperless Trade and UPS Paperless are first-class — international shipments produce a digital commercial invoice with a signature image rather than a paper form taped to the box. That removes a real source of customs holds whether you ship from the US to Europe, from the UK to North America, or any other cross-border lane.

Where Shippo is still the better pick

Shippo has been around since 2013 and earned its install base on legitimate strengths:

• Carrier breadth. If you ship with a long tail of regional US carriers (UPS, FedEx, DHL Express, USPS, OnTrac, GLS US, Lasership, etc.) Shippo's managed network is faster to start than connecting each carrier API yourself.
• Multi-platform. If you sell on Shopify and eBay and Amazon and Etsy, Shippo unifies them in one inbox. ShipLab is Shopify-only.
• US-specific workflows. Scan Forms, USPS Cubic pricing, US-domestic Returns API, native address validation on US addresses — these are features US-volume merchants actually use.
• Brand recognition and reviews. 13k+ Shopify installs and thousands of public reviews make Shippo the safest "nobody got fired for choosing it" option for US stores.

ShipLab's roadmap will add carriers over time, but as of today it is intentionally narrow: deep DHL Express and UPS, EU-customs-aware, Shopify-native. If your business is wide-and-domestic instead of deep-and-cross-border, Shippo is the safer fit.

Migration: moving from Shippo to ShipLab

Switching is straightforward because ShipLab works exclusively on your own carrier contracts:

1. Pull your UPS Client ID and Secret from the UPS Developer Portal, or your DHL Express API credentials from DHL MyAPI. If you were using Shippo's negotiated rates, sign your own direct contract with the carrier — at any meaningful volume the discount you negotiate yourself usually beats the aggregated rate.
2. Install ShipLab from the Shopify App Store, add a Shipper Account, paste credentials, run the connection test.
3. Recreate your automation rules inside the ShipLab condition builder. Most Shippo if/then rules map directly; nested logic is now possible if you want it.
4. Add ShipLab as a rate provider in Settings → Shipping and delivery in Shopify Admin.
5. Run both apps in parallel for 48 hours, monitor labels, then disable Shippo and cancel its plan.

Historical orders, tracking numbers, and label PDFs all stay on Shopify itself — nothing about the order data is locked into either app.

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