Pirate Ship has no key to paste. Your store moves orders across with spreadsheets, both ways, and you pay Pirate Ship directly for postage. Pirate Ship doesn't give live prices, so checkout uses your own prices (flat, free over, pickup). A live-rate option shows its fallback price.
The five steps
- In your store, go to Store → Orders, tick the orders to ship (or leave none ticked for all "To ship"), and press Export for Pirate Ship. Check the line ("14 orders · 16 boxes · 2 abroad") and press Download file.
- Log In at pirateship.com, go to Ship, and drag the file in. The first time, Pirate Ship asks what each column is. The names already match, so check them and save. It remembers next time.
- Pick the package type and service, add insurance or customs if needed, and buy the labels. Print them.
- In Pirate Ship, open your shipments list. Click any column header → Columns, and turn on Order ID, Tracking Number, Carrier, Service and Passthrough (if listed). Filter to today and click Export.
- Back in your store, Store → Orders → Import from Pirate Ship, choose that file, check the preview ("12 matched · 1 already shipped · 1 not found") and press Mark 12 shipped. Customers get your "shipped" email with their tracking.
What's in the export
One row per box: the order number (with -2, -3 for extra boxes), name, address, email, the box weight in ounces, its size, the items (printed on the label's corner), "Box 1 of 2", and a short reference that brings the tracking back to the exact order. Flat rate boxes leave the size blank: pick the flat rate package in Pirate Ship. If any item has no weight, the weight is left blank and Pirate Ship uses your batch default (the export screen warns you). Orders with nothing for you to ship (made by Printful, or the rest was refunded) aren't in the file; the export screen says how many.
- Orders to countries we can't ship to are never exported.
- International orders: fill in the customs form in Pirate Ship.
- Exported orders get Sent to Pirate Ship on their history, and the next export skips them unless you tick Include orders already sent.
- The file holds customers' addresses: it's made fresh for the download and never kept.
Bringing tracking back
The import reads CSV or XLSX. It finds the columns by name and shows its guess; change any that's wrong. Rows match by the reference, then the order number, then email + ZIP, then name + ZIP. Importing the same file twice changes nothing.
If you void a label in Pirate Ship, open the order here and press Undo shipped on that shipment. Its items go back to not shipped and their stock is held for the order again. Other shipments stay as they are. With EasyPost or Shippo also connected, Pirate Ship tracking numbers update by themselves; otherwise the tracking page links to the carrier's site.