A retailer routing guide is the document a retailer gives its suppliers that says how every shipment to that retailer must be packed, labeled, documented, and carried. For parcel shippers the key point is simple: on orders covered by a guide, the retailer picks the carrier and service, not you. Your job is to know which of your orders fall under a guide, follow it exactly on those, and keep your own carrier choice for everything else.

What is a retailer routing guide?

A routing guide is a compliance document, not a set of suggestions. SPS Commerce, in its article on how to read a routing guide, describes guides running 60 to 200 pages and calls a retailer's routing guide "a compliance document", with sections that cover preferred carriers and labeling requirements.

The guide is part of your trading relationship. When you accept a purchase order from a retailer that publishes one, you are agreeing to ship that order the way the guide says. Each retailer writes its own, updates it on its own schedule, and expects suppliers to keep up. Two retailers can ask for opposite things, so a rule you learned from one customer does not carry over to the next.

For a team that mostly ships parcels to dealers, job sites, and small business customers, the guide can feel like a freight document that does not apply. It does apply. Small replenishment orders and drop ship orders can move as parcels, and the guide may cover them too.

What does a routing guide usually contain?

A routing guide typically answers four questions: who carries the shipment, how it is labeled, what data you send, and what happens if you get it wrong. The sections below are the ones SPS Commerce names, grouped by what a shipping team does with them.

Section	What it tells you	Who on your team owns it
Approved carriers	Which carriers and services you may use, often by region and by shipment weight and volume	Shipping lead
Labeling requirements	What labels go on each carton and where	Warehouse and pack stations
Documents and data	Which electronic documents you send and when, such as the advance ship notice (ASN)	EDI or IT
Chargeback schedule	The deductions the retailer takes for each kind of miss	Finance and accounts receivable

Read the guide with all four owners in the room at least once. A shipping lead who reads only the carrier section will miss a labeling rule, and a finance team that sees only the deductions will not know which process caused them.

Why does the routing guide decide your carrier?

The guide decides your carrier because the retailer sets the approved carrier roster, and your shipment has to fit it. SPS Commerce puts it plainly: "Using your favorite carrier because they give you a better rate can be a mistake if that carrier isn't on the retailer's approved roster for that specific region." The same article notes that "retailers often have complex routing logic based on the weight and volume of the shipment."

Two practical consequences follow.

First, rate shopping is switched off for routed orders. The lowest rate on your screen is irrelevant if the carrier behind it is not on the roster for that destination. The cost comparison you run on your own orders does not apply here.

Second, the answer can change with the shipment. Because routing logic can depend on weight and volume, a two-carton order and a twenty-carton order to the same retailer may be routed differently, and a large enough order may leave parcel altogether. If you are unsure where that line sits for your product, our guide to LTL vs parcel shipping covers how the two modes differ. The retailer's guide, not a general rule of thumb, has the final word on its own orders.

If a guide tells you to ship on an account the retailer controls, the label has to be produced on that account through whatever system the retailer specifies. A label you buy yourself on a different account does not satisfy that instruction, even when the carrier name matches.

What happens when a shipment does not follow the guide?

When a shipment misses a rule, the retailer deducts a chargeback from what it pays you. According to SPS Commerce, guides contain a "chargeback schedule", and the way a deduction is calculated can differ by violation: the article's example is "a flat fee for a late advanced ship notice (ASN) but a percentage of the total invoice for a missed delivery window."

Data errors count as much as physical ones. SPS Commerce warns that "a missing or incorrectly formatted segment in any document can trigger a failed data chargeback even if the shipment is physically perfect." A carton can arrive on time, undamaged, with the right carrier, and still generate a deduction because the electronic paperwork was wrong or late.

The amounts are set by each retailer and belong in your own copy of each guide, so we do not list any here. What matters operationally is that every deduction traces back to a named rule. If finance can tie each deduction to a section of the guide, the warehouse can fix the cause instead of absorbing the cost.

How do you separate routed orders from the ones you control?

Separate them at order entry, before anything reaches a pack station, by flagging every order as either routed or shipper's choice. A packer should never have to decide which rules apply. A workable process looks like this:

List every customer that has sent you a routing guide, vendor manual, or shipping instructions with penalties attached.
Add a field in your ERP or order system that marks those customers as routed, and store the current guide version and date with it.
For each routed customer, write a one-page summary: approved carriers by region and size, label rules, required documents and their deadlines.
Route flagged orders to the compliance workflow you use for that retailer, including its EDI documents and carton labels.
Send every unflagged order to your normal rate-shopped label workflow.
Tag each chargeback with the rule it cites and review the list monthly with shipping, IT, and finance.
Recheck each guide on a schedule and whenever the retailer announces a change.

A worked example

The numbers below are hypothetical and are here only to show the split.

Say a housewares distributor ships 500 parcels in a typical week. After flagging customers, the team finds:

120 parcels go to two retail chains that publish routing guides. Carrier, service, labels, and documents are dictated.
80 parcels are drop ship orders for a third retailer whose vendor program names the carrier and requires its own packing slip.
300 parcels go to independent stores, contractors, and offices with no routing instructions at all.

In this example, 200 parcels a week are routed and 300 are shipper's choice. The distributor cannot rate shop the first 200, so the effort there goes into compliance: correct labels, on-time documents, fewer deductions. The effort on the other 300 goes into cost and speed, because the team is free to pick the carrier on every one. Treating the two groups as one workflow is how a routed order ends up on the wrong carrier, or how a free-choice order ends up overpaying on a carrier nobody needed to use.

Where GoatLabels fits

GoatLabels fits only the shipments where you are free to choose the carrier and buy your own label. In the example above, that is the 300 parcels with no routing instructions, not the 200 that a retailer controls.

The limits are specific. GoatLabels does not produce retailer compliance labels (GS1-128 or UCC-128), does not create or send EDI documents such as an ASN, and has no native EDI, ERP, or WMS connectors. It does not support bring-your-own carrier accounts or negotiated rates, so it cannot buy a label on a retailer's carrier account or on your own contract. It does not handle LTL or freight. If an order is governed by a routing guide, use the system and accounts the retailer requires. Our pages on EDI shipping labels and drop ship vendor shipping labels explain that boundary in more detail.

For shipper's choice orders, GoatLabels rate shops USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL on every parcel from one account, with one all-in number per carrier. Orders come in through a CSV import of up to 500 rows per file, or through the REST API, which is how a team can connect an ERP; see ERP shipping integration for that pattern. Labels are paid from a prepaid wallet, and each one posts to a dated ledger entry that carries your reference, so a customer or PO number follows the cost. The Free plan is $0 a month for 50 shipments a month, and Pro is a flat $40 a month for unlimited shipments with cheaper label rates and no contract. The wider picture for business shippers is on our B2B shipping software page.

The useful first step costs nothing: flag your routed customers, count the parcels on each side of the line, and decide what each side needs.