Can I choose my Ship Date?

Can I buy a label and use it a few days later?

Updated this week

Ship Date

In Pirate Ship, you can change your Ship Date and when your Tracking Emails will be sent. 

Both USPS and UPS allow you to set your ship date on Pirate Ship for up to 7 days into the future 👍

To schedule your Ship Date, fill out the recipient's information and package details and click GET RATES. Before you click BUY LABEL, click the calendar icon and select your ship date:

USPS usually allows you to ship your package as long as the Ship Date is within a few days of when you actually hand them the package... however, it is at each employee's discretion. They can technically refuse to ship your package if you wait too long! The best practice is to get your package into the mail stream as close to the postmarked date as possible. 

UPS® prefers that you use your labels as soon as possible after purchasing them. If UPS considers a label too old to use, there's a chance that the package will be routed to a UPS Overgoods location, which is a facility where UPS holds packages that are unable to be recovered 🙈

If a UPS label has been sitting without being used, the best practice is to simply recreate it and pay for a new one! Keep in mind that our software automatically refunds labels after 28 days. If your UPS label is auto-refunded, you'll need to recreate that label and not use the original refunded label when shipping out your package 😉

If you use a refunded label or if you use a label more than once, that package will get sent to a UPS Overgoods location and will be unable to be recovered.

Rates may change depending on the Ship Date you choose

One thing to keep in mind when purchasing labels is that you may see different rates depending on the day of the week it is 😅 For instance, UPS adds a "Saturday Processing Fee" surcharge to a label if UPS accepts it into its network on a Saturday.

So, if you're seeing rates that include Saturday Processing Fee surcharges, changing the Ship Date to a weekday and dropping off/scheduling a pickup for your package on that day won't incur that surcharge.

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