In this post, I want to share a little-known benefit of using Pirate Ship for scheduling UPS pickups. Let me give you some background first. I became an Amazon Seller during the heyday when it was easy to sell on Amazon and I used UPS shipping to send shipments to the Amazon warehouse multiple times a week.
During that time, UPS offered one year of free pickups if you opened an account with them. But what people didn’t talk about was that even after the free pickup year was up, you could still continue to get free pickups for several years. I learned this the hard way when I used the UPS service to buy a label, and it activated something in the back end that started charging me for weekly pickups. So, I closed that account and opened another one to continue getting free pickups for over a year, until UPS caught on and started charging me.
At that point, I slowed down my Amazon selling and didn’t need weekly pickups anymore. So, I switched to pay-per-pickup, which cost about $7.50 per pickup, and I believe the weekly fee was around $16. Since I was shipping less than twice a week, it was cheaper for me to schedule pickups and pay the one-time fee.
I am still using this method today, but here’s the secret hack: you can schedule UPS pickups through Pirate Ship for only $4. If you check the UPS website, it’s likely that their pickup cost is $8, so you get it at half the price with Pirate Ship. It’s simple to use, and you just need to schedule it by 1:00 PM on the day you want the pickup. In my case, even if the weekly price is $16, I come out ahead as long as I don’t ship more than 4 days a week. If I ship less than 5 days a week, it’s cheaper for me to use this method, which is why I continue to use it.
Even if you’re not shipping to Amazon warehouses like I do, you can use this feature when shipping with eBay or other platforms. And the best part is, Pirate Ship is free, so there’s no monthly service charge to access this option. You just pay $4 whenever you need to schedule a pickup, and you don’t even have to buy postage through Pirate Ship to use this feature. I personally pay for my UPS postage for Amazon through Amazon itself, and then I schedule my pickups through Pirate Ship.