Shipping Tips
Ask a fast-growing brand how many shipping carriers they use, and you'll often get a pause before the answer. One for local deliveries. One for overnight. One they added last year for international, because a customer in London complained. Nobody planned this carrier mix—it just accumulated, one workaround at a time.
That's the moment multi-location shipping stops being a logistics detail and starts being an operational identity crisis. Mohammed Baloch, General Manager of GlobalPost, spoke on a ShipStation Global Innovation Delivered panel about scaling without complexity. He had a name for what this actually looks like from the carrier side: a "Frankenstein carrier portfolio."
Here's what's really breaking when brands hit this wall, and what it takes to simplify multi-location shipping before it costs you customers.
Multi-location shipping doesn't usually break the day a brand opens a second warehouse. It breaks when that brand keeps operating like it only has one.
Bethany DeAngelo, VP of Product at ShipStation Global, put it plainly on the panel: teams can manage exceptions manually for a while. Someone always knows which warehouse should fulfill which order, which carrier is cheapest that week, which inventory needs rebalancing. Then volume grows, and knowledge that lives only in one person's head becomes a bottleneck instead of a shortcut.
The fix isn't more technology bolted onto the same habits. It's pulling decisions out of people's heads and into repeatable rules—automating what can be automated, and consolidating what still needs a human.
When a brand hits that wall, Baloch says, it shows up first in how they spend their time—less on customers, more on managing carriers:
"What we typically see—we'll call it a Frankenstein carrier portfolio. They'll have a carrier for local deliveries, a carrier for international, a carrier for overnight. You're spread so thin in terms of your volume that you're not getting great economics on your rates, and overall it's just not a scalable carrier strategy."
—Mohammed Baloch, General Manager, GlobalPost
That's the trap: each carrier addition feels like a fix in the moment. But the pile-up quietly erodes your rates, your visibility, and your ability to actually manage the operation instead of babysitting it.
The most common mistake brands make trying to correct course, according to Baloch, is over-indexing on rate alone. Cheap rates don't matter if packages get stuck in customs or bounced back to sender.
"If you have the best rates but your packages are getting delayed for customs or regulatory reasons—or returned to sender—you're ultimately dealing with a bad customer experience."
—Mohammed Baloch, General Manager, GlobalPost
The alternative isn't collecting more carriers. It's finding a partner—or a small set of them—who can deliver competitive rates. That partner should also carry you through the regulatory, compliance, and scaling curve as your reach grows.
Multi-location shipping became harder for a structural reason, not just an operational one. James Marley, VP of Cross-Border at Swap Commerce, walked through it on the panel. In 2025, the US ended the de minimis exception for goods manufactured in China, and the EU rolled out its own de minimis changes in July of 2026. The UK has opened its own consultation on ending its de minimis threshold too. Marley put it plainly: a package into the US used to need only a description and a value on the form. Now, by his count, it takes more than 30 data fields.
Marley framed the shift this way:
"De minimis isn't just a tax rule. It's an entire operational architecture."
—James Marley, VP of Cross-Border, SwapCommerce
For many brands, that architecture just disappeared from under them—and the consumer-facing risk is real. A shopper who receives a duty bill at the doorstep instead of at checkout isn't going to order again. As Marley put it: "That's not a logistics failure—it's a brand failure."
This is exactly the gap GlobalPost is built to close. Instead of stitching together country-by-country carrier relationships—one for Canada, one for the UK, one for wherever's next—an aggregated network absorbs that complexity instead. According to Baloch, brands need a partner with an aggregated network—one that manages several geographies and carries them through compliance and customs changes. That's how you scale, instead of building those relationships one at a time.
GlobalPost's network spans 220+ countries, with flexible duty and tax handling—buyer-paid or seller-paid—so brands aren't locked into one model as they expand. Carrier consolidation solves more than rates, too. Visibility is one of the first things to break when shipments cross borders through a patchwork of carriers. Tracking often goes dark the moment a package hits the destination country's network.
Baloch noted that GlobalPost has been investing directly to close that gap. End-to-end tracking on select services means customers—and shippers—stop guessing where a package actually is.
Closing out the panel, each speaker gave one concrete first move for a brand scaling to multiple locations or shipping internationally for the first time. Baloch's answer was two-fold, and it's a useful gut check for any brand about to expand its footprint:
"Don't try to go completely global out of the gate. Pick a lane where you're seeing a lot of volume—whether it's Canada or the UK—manage those complexities and compliance requirements, and then expand from there. Second: data has to be correct. If it isn't, you're going to see things stopped at customs, items getting returned. That's ultimately a bad customer experience."
—Mohammed Baloch, General Manager, GlobalPost
That's the throughline of the whole panel, really: simplifying multi-location shipping isn't about adding more tools or more carriers. It's about picking the right partner, getting your data right, and expanding in order—not all at once.
Growing into new warehouses and new markets shouldn't mean growing a carrier portfolio you can't manage. See how GlobalPost helps shippers simplify multi-location shipping with one network spanning 220+ countries—no volume minimums required to get started.
