How shipping brokers actually work — and how wholesale rates get priced.
Carriers price in volume tiers.
UPS, FedEx, and DHL all publish a retail rate sheet — the numbers you see if you walk into a UPS Store or open a new account on ups.com. Almost nobody pays retail at scale. Every carrier negotiates off-retail discounts based on annual spend, service mix, and shipping patterns.
Discounts step up in tiers roughly corresponding to annual carrier spend: $50K, $250K, $1M, $5M, $25M+. At the top tier, negotiated rates typically sit 30–50% below published retail. A business shipping 200 labels a month is in the bottom tier; a Fortune 500 shipper sending 500,000 labels a month is in the top tier. Same UPS, same truck, same label format — very different price.
Priority Shippers aggregates volume.
Priority Shippers holds UPS, FedEx, and DHL contracts negotiated at aggregated enterprise volume. We aren't one business shipping a million labels — we're a brokerage routing hundreds of customers' shipments through carrier contracts priced at the top of the volume curve. When your shipment prints under our account, the carrier charges our negotiated rate, not your rate.
We pass the carrier's wholesale rate to you, add a transparent margin, and send you one invoice. You pay less per label than you ever could as a standalone 50-package-a-month shipper. That's the entire product.
Onboarding is a credentials swap.
- 1Send a recent UPS or FedEx invoice
We return a line-by-line rate comparison, usually within one business day.
- 2Get account credentials
If the numbers make sense, we set up your Priority Shippers account and share carrier credentials.
- 3Swap credentials in your label tool
ShipStation, Shopify, WooCommerce, or manual label software — the switch is a credentials update. Everything in your workflow stays identical.
- 4Ship at wholesale rates
Every label runs through our wholesale account. Weekly invoices show retail rate, your rate, and our margin per shipment.
Billing is one weekly invoice.
You pay Priority Shippers, not UPS. One weekly invoice aggregates every label printed that week, with a line item per shipment showing the published retail rate, your Priority Shippers rate, and the margin we retain. Accessorial charges (residential surcharge, dim weight, fuel) are billed at the carrier's published amount — we don't mark them up.
No monthly subscription, no account minimum, no setup fee, no cancellation penalty. Use Priority Shippers for as many or as few labels as you want in any given month.
Who this works for, honestly.
The economics start making sense around 50 packages a month. Below that, the per-label savings don't justify the workflow switch. Between 50 and 500 packages a month, most customers save somewhere between $200 and $2,500 monthly. Above that, savings scale linearly — a meat distributor shipping 800 Next Day Air labels a month typically saves $6,000–8,000. An e-commerce operator shipping 200 Ground labels a day saves around $20,000 monthly.
Savings are biggest on expedited air services. A shipper leaning heavily on Next Day Air or Second Day Air sees dramatically higher per-label savings than a Ground-only shipper.
Frequently asked
Is this a reseller account or my own UPS contract?
It's a pass-through reseller arrangement. Priority Shippers holds the carrier contracts. Your shipments print through our accounts, which means you inherit our volume-tier pricing without signing anything with UPS or FedEx directly.
How long does onboarding take?
Most customers are printing wholesale labels within 48 hours. If you use ShipStation, Shopify, or another platform, the switch is a credentials swap. If you print labels manually, we set you up with a simple web-based label tool.
What does Priority Shippers earn on each label?
A small transparent margin between our contracted rate and your rate — shown line-by-line on every weekly invoice. No hidden fees, no accessorial markups, no surprise line items.
Find out what you'd save in 60 seconds.
Send us a CSV of your recent shipments — or just a few screenshots of past UPS or FedEx shipments. We'll show you exactly what those shipments would have cost on Priority Shippers rates. No commitment, no sales call required.