If you are weighing the cost of buy in for shipping labels and over all cost of shipping, don’t forget to include your gas mileage, time you spend hand writing things and time spent driving (your time value of money). It might be something that actually saves you money when you take into account all of your incidental costs.

Maybe you’ve already done that, and if so, and your current process is saving you money, the next question to ask is “Is this scaleable?” If you double your demand, does this process still work for you? What about triple? At some point there will be a plateau where you will cap the growth of your business if you aren’t managing shipping differently. Find out where that plateau falls, and if it isn’t right now, start planning ahead for when it comes in the future so you’ll be able to make the switch when it’s time. UPS makes it very easy to ship from your home for a monthly fee, just as an example.