EasyPost vs. Route
Route inserts a third-party brand between you and your customer, taxes the shopper at checkout, and just cut off merchants under 1,000 orders a month. EasyPost is the merchant-owned alternative — shipping, tracking, and protection in one pipeline, on any platform, at roughly half the cost of Route's consumer-pays-at-checkout model.
They're not the same product — but they meet on post-purchase.
Route is a consumer-facing post-purchase layer sold to merchant marketing teams. EasyPost is shipping infrastructure for the whole lifecycle. The overlap — tracking and protection — is where most of this page lives.
EasyPost
Pre-purchase through post-purchase, in one pipeline. Multi-carrier rate shopping, label generation, address verification, tracking, and insurance — API-first, platform-agnostic, sold to developers and ops at scaling brands, platforms, and 3PLs.
- Rate-shop and buy labels across 100+ carriers
- Normalized tracking data and branded tracking pages
- Merchant-owned shipping insurance at 1% of value
- Claims API that keeps your customer on your domain
- Runs on any commerce platform or homegrown OMS
Route
A shopper-facing add-on that sits on top of your existing shipping. Route sells to marketing teams, charges the buyer at checkout, and brings its own brand and consumer app into the journey.
- Route-branded tracking page and consumer mobile app
- Protection charged to the shopper at ~2.5% of cart
- AI product recommendations and cash-back loyalty
- Shopify-first; limited depth outside that ecosystem
- Reads tracking only — doesn't touch rates or labels
- ~1,000 orders/month onboarding floor
The comparison, by the numbers.
What it actually costs, who pays, what's branded, and what happens when you grow — or when you don't.
| Dimension | EasyPost | Route |
|---|---|---|
| Cost & Ownership | ||
| Who pays for protection | Merchant — 1% of declared value, integrated with the label EP Wins | Shopper — ~2.5% of cart total, $1.95 minimum, added at checkout |
| Coverage cap | $5,000 standard · up to $15,000 on custom plans EP Wins | ~$5,000 per order |
| Whose brand is on the post-purchase experience | Merchant — your brand end-to-end via Track and the Claims API EP Wins | Route — Route app and Route-branded web tracking, with your logo alongside |
| Claims flow | Claims API lets you build the claim flow on your own domain. Reimbursement typically within 10 days of approval. EP Wins | Claims submitted through Route's system; resolution speed varies by case |
| Platform & Coverage | ||
| Platform fit | API-first, carrier-agnostic — Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, headless, marketplaces, 3PL WMS, and homegrown OMS EP Wins | Shopify-first. Plugins for BigCommerce, Magento, Woo. Limited depth outside the Shopify ecosystem. |
| Carrier coverage | 100+ carriers, one API, rate-shop in real time EP Wins | Reads tracking from any carrier; doesn't touch rates or labels |
| Minimum order volume | None — ship your first label to your millionth on the same stack EP Wins | ~1,000/mo — recent Shopify App Store reviews report Route refusing to onboard merchants below this threshold |
| Stack depth | Shipping, tracking, insurance and claims in one pipeline, one vendor, one dashboard EP Wins | Post-purchase layer that rides on top of whatever shipping you already have |
| Positioning | ||
| Revenue features | Focus is shipping economics: rate-shopping, SLA optimization, reduced WISMO via better tracking | AI product recommendations and cash-back loyalty baked into the tracking touchpoint RO Wins |
| Third-party app rating | Published ratings vary by platform; the core product is an API, not an app store listing | 3.6 stars on the Shopify App Store, with recurring complaints about claim handling and branding |
What a year of insurance actually costs.
Assume a brand with 50,000 shipments per year, $120 average cart value, and $95 average declared product value. Here's who pays what.
EasyPost
EasyPost model — merchant pays. Infrastructure-layer insurance at 1% of declared value, on every shipment you choose. $95.00 declared value × 1% = $0.95 per shipment, across 50,000 shipments a year, at 100% coverage.
Paid by you — every shipment coveredRoute
Route model — shopper pays. Consumer-facing add-on at ~2.5% of cart, charged to the buyer at checkout. $120.00 cart × 2.5% = $3.00 per order, across 50,000 orders a year, at a typical ~60% opt-in rate.
Charged to your shoppers — 60% coveredWhy brands choose EasyPost over Route.
Not a tone change. Not a re-skin. Five structural differences that change what you own, what you pay, and who your customer is loyal to.
You own every touchpoint after checkout.
Every tracking email, every SMS, every status page, every claim submission — Route puts its brand in the middle of that journey. EasyPost Track and the Claims API keep your customer on your domain, in your voice, with your data. When they come back, they come back to you, not to a cross-brand app.
Tracking lives in the Route app. Route branding appears alongside yours at checkout and in post-purchase comms. Cross-brand discovery surfaces competitors in the same UI.
No-code branded tracking page and Claims API on your domain. Webhooks push tracking events into your OMS. Your email template, your SMS copy, your colors.
Insurance at 1%, not 2.5%.
Route's model taxes the shopper at checkout — a 2.5% add-on priced in front of the CVV. That's a conversion drag you pay for in abandoned carts. EasyPost insures the shipment at the merchant layer for roughly 40% of the cost, with no checkout friction and no shopper opt-in required.
~2.5% of cart ($1.95 min), shown to the shopper at checkout. Free to the merchant, but the line item degrades conversion and trains the buyer to associate your brand with upsells.
1% of declared value. Merchant-paid. Invisible to the shopper. Applied automatically by rule or via the Insure endpoint.
We scale down with you, not away from you.
Recent Shopify App Store reviews document Route implementing a ~1,000-orders-per-month onboarding floor in early 2026 — cutting off smaller merchants and brands returning after a rebuild. EasyPost has no such floor. Ship your first label with us; ship your millionth on the same stack.
Merchant reports indicate Route declined to re-onboard existing customers who fell below 1,000 shipments/month after a replatform, even with years of prior history.
Free to start. No minimums. Pricing that scales linearly with volume, not a step function that kicks in at arbitrary thresholds.
Any platform. Any carrier. No lock-in.
Route's center of gravity is Shopify. If you're running headless, multi-storefront, marketplace-heavy, B2B, or on a homegrown OMS — or if you'll ever need to move — that becomes real friction. EasyPost is API-first with 100+ integrated carriers and zero opinions about your commerce engine.
Deepest integration is the Shopify app. BigCommerce, Magento, Woo plugins exist. Outside of those, you're on your own.
REST API, client libraries for .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, Node, PHP, Go. Works with any platform that can make an HTTP call.
Shipping, tracking, and protection in one pipeline.
Route requires you to bolt a post-purchase layer onto whatever shipping stack you already have — two vendors, two data models, two places where a support rep has to look things up. EasyPost is the pipeline: label to tracking event to insurance to claim, on one dashboard, one contract, one source of truth.
Runs parallel to your shipping provider. Your team switches between dashboards to reconcile a single lost package.
Shipment, Tracker, Insurance, and Claim are primitives in the same API. Webhook once, get every event. Operations team logs in once.
What Route does that we don't.
Route ships a consumer mobile app with millions of installs, cash-back and loyalty mechanics, and AI product recommendations surfaced inside the tracking touchpoint.
Route is the better fit — if you…
- Bought Route specifically for cross-brand discovery and remarketing rather than for protection
- Rely on its consumer mobile app, with millions of installs, as a channel in its own right
- Use cash-back and loyalty mechanics as a core part of your retention strategy
- Treat AI product recommendations inside the tracking touchpoint as a primary growth driver
What you get with EasyPost instead
- Tracking emails and SMS from EasyPost Track that go to your list and reinforce your brand
- Post-purchase touchpoints triggered by events you already pay us to produce, at no extra layer
- Protection at 1% of declared value on every shipment, with no shopper opt-in and no checkout friction
- A customer who returns to your domain rather than to someone else's app
Ship on the infrastructure you own.
Start free, no credit card, no minimum volume, no consumer-facing upsell at your checkout. Migration support is available for teams currently on Route.
