An In-Depth Look at Pirate Ship: All the Benefits of Endicia and Stamps.com Without a Monthly Cost?

Pirate Ship is a website that purports to allow deep USPS discounts—the same discounts you can get through paid programs like Endicia—without an added fee of any kind, beyond the cost of the postage. They even take it a step further by offering one that isn't included in other free platforms (at least, not that I'm aware of): Priority Mail Cubic, which can knock a few cents off of qualifying Priority Mail shipments. But is it just another case of “too good to be true”, or is it actually as useful as it claims to be? Let's delve in to the details and find out! 

SITE/NAVIGATION

Pirate Ship's simple navigational bar

The site is rather bare-bones (pun honestly not intended; I promise there are no more pirate references the rest of the way), with all of the available options off to the left, via a navigation bar. Recent shipments are automatically placed on the front page once you sign in, so accessing them is a breeze. Since Pirate Ship just focuses on one thing (USPS postage), the site isn’t as confusing or cluttered as other sites can be, and runs a lot faster than eBay and Paypal, with very little time necessary to “download” prices once you have all the information punched in. 

It’s very straightforward to navigate…if you can’t get the hang of this in a few minutes, then you should probably just give up on using computers altogether.

The simple options menu for creating labels.

Printing postage is as easy as pie, and can be done in a couple of clicks. One great feature that's really helpful is that you can paste the address into a general text field at the top of the screen, and it automatically fills in the proper fields in the address section without the need for additional clicks. This saves time from requiring you to either manually enter the address yourself, or copy and paste each individual field, and is a nice addition.

FEES

Here’s where things go off the rails, right? I mean, it claims to be a free service, so here’s where we find out that there are a load of hidden fees, or added costs to postage…right? Actually, no. It really is completely free, with a comparison of eBay, Pirate Ship, and Paypal all offering the same cost for First Class postage. All you need to sign up are a credit (or debit) card to pay for postage, and off you go. If you don’t want to have a bunch of separate transactions, you can also “pre-load” your Pirate Ship account with a larger sum (say, $10), with that money deducted every time you ship, and the balance reloaded in $10 increments.

The labels used to print off as “Endicia” labels, which made me believe that somehow it’s all tied to one account, with all the users of Pirate Ship contributing to that account’s “volume”, thus allowing the discounts, but I’m completely guessing on that front. As of a new update (circa around January, 2019), the labels print off as Pitney Bowes, so I'm not sure how the system is working, but it still works seamlessly. 

Random image of the ship screen, to break up text without overloading the first section with images.

So how do they make money? They have this question on their own FAQ; basically, they lean on their partnership with USPS to make money, the way other businesses do. However, by limiting the number of employees (I believe there are somewhere around 4 on staff), they don’t have the overhead that other businesses require, thus allowing to pocket more as “profit”. It seems to make sense, though I have no knowledge of how lucrative a USPS partnership can be, so I'll just take their word for it.

The downside for me here is that you have to use a debit or credit card—there is no Paypal support, which seems like a curious omission. Since virtually every place I sell supports Paypal, I tend to use that as my “business” account, more or less, with my checking account geared more toward personal purchases. It would be a lot more convenient for me (and probably a lot of other people) to at least have the option of using a different payment platform.

For a real-world scenario, shortly after starting to use this service, I accrued a fraudulent charge on said debit card (it was a completely unrelated scenario). Since my card was closed out by the bank while I was waiting for a new one to arrive, that meant I couldn't use Pirate Ship, as they don't accept any other forms of payment besides a physical card. (I'm pretty sure that they used to accept direct payments from bank accounts, but even that no longer seems to be an option.) If they would open up to other payment platforms, this service would be pretty close to flawless.

APP

Like pretty much every shipping program that I know of, outside of the actual carriers, Pirate Ship does not currently have an app. Of course, mobile users can still access the site on their device of choice, to grab info from previous shipments, such as tracking numbers. I'm assuming postage can also be printed from the device, assuming you have a printer capable of wireless printing, but I have never tried using this feature, so I cannot confirm that it would actually work.

SERVICE/SUPPORT

Some helpful support options are available on the bottom of your main dashboard.

Shipping with Pirate Ship would probably have been the perfect experience for me were it not for some initial problems setting up my account that really left a bad taste in my mouth. 

I signed up some time around August, 2018, and quickly found that I received an error message any time I tried to add money to my account. I contacted Pirate Ship about the problem and someone responded quickly that everything was taken care of, and that I was good to go. Well, I don’t tend to ship a lot of items, and for my next couple of orders I opted to just stick with Paypal, meaning it was about another month or so before I went to buy another label.

I finally decided to try Pirate Ship again, and this time I get an error that my debit card could not be authorized. Flustered, and facing a time crunch on getting items out, I didn’t want to be waiting for support to get back to me, so I shipped it with Paypal again. I figured it was just a system error—I verified that I did, in fact, have money in my account—so I decided to wait before bothering support again. A couple of days later, I gave it another shot, and got the same error message—my card, which was my personal card that never gave me issues anywhere else—could not be authorized.

Rather annoyed, I reached out to Pirate Ship to try to figure it out once and for all. Honestly, I normally would have given up on them by this point, but considering it’s a free service, and I heard nothing but great things about them, I was more determined than usual to try them out for myself. The associate who responded, Bjorn (which I believe turned out to be one of the owners/founders), informed me that there was a problem with my card, that there were no other accepted forms of payment besides debit/credit cards, and that if I wanted to continue using their service, I would need to submit a copy of my driver’s license to verify my identity.

Excuse me, what?! All this for a FREE service?

The tip of the iceberg was after submitting it, and being okayed to use the service, I asked them what prompted the check in the first place, expecting some genuine answer that would alleviate my slight displeasure. The response: “Sometimes our security team does random checks.” I find it hard to believe that a company who seems desperate for as many users as possible, would run the risk of turning potential consumers off by verifying their identities for absolutely no reason.

I also recently encountered a service error while trying to ship a package, where after filling in all of the fields, I was informed that the system was down and that I would need to retry in order to pay for, and print off, the postage. I tried again two or three times and was hit with the same message every time. In a hurry, I once again ended up using Paypal's shipping service. This has only happened once in the six or so months I’ve been using it, but it was still yet another frustrating annoyance that leads me to wonder what other errors I’m potentially going to encounter every time I open the program, especially since I've never encountered a similar error on PayPal, or any other shipping platform that I can recall.

OVERALL

PROS (+):

+It really is free, with no monthly fees or postage markups of any kind

+Copy and paste tool makes filling out address fields a breeze
+Printing labels is a very simple process
+Interface is fluid and straightforward, and all past shipments are available right from the main dashboard
+Support is friendly, and quick to respond.
+Ability to export order details.

CONS (-):

-Had initial troubles signing up that haven't seemed to affect anyone else, and was given no real explanation for why.
-Accepts only debit/credit cards; no PayPal support for postage payments
-Occasional service hiccups mean you should probably have a backup option
-Only for USPS shipments.

I’m definitely recommending Pirate Ship, if for no other reason than its price…which truthfully is zero dollars (aside from the cost of postage, of course), and with all the benefits and discounts you get from paid services like Endicia, but must say that my experience has not come without some annoyances that haven't seemed to affect anyone else: There are nothing but five-star reviews for this program across the internet (all of which sound genuine, by the way, and not a part of some corroborated campaign to make the app seem better than it really is), with people raving about every aspect of it, and struggling to come up with a single con. This leads me to believe the obvious: that they didn’t go through any of the baffling credit card authorization problems that I had while signing up. I also once ran into an issue where the server appeared to be down, forcing me to use an alternate shipping solution as no labels could be printed. Since that has only happened to me once in the six months I've used Pirate Ship, it doesn't seem to be a constant issue, but one worth noting.

However, the simple navigation and convenient access to previous shipments is a huge win. Since it only deals with USPS shipments, it's unfortunately not an all-in-one shipping solution for me, but it's much simpler to use than Paypal's shipping service, and offers discounts not available with ShippingEasy's free option.

RATING: 7.5/10