Update Your 2026 Shipping Playbook and Save | Descartes Pacejet

2026 Shipping Playbook: How to Use Descartes Pacejet Upgrades You May Have Overlooked

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If you spent most of 2025 focused on keeping orders moving, managing growing complexity, or trying to make every person on your team as efficient as possible, you’re not alone. The good news? While you were busy getting the job done, we rolled out a series of practical, high-impact updates designed to help you reduce costs, improve service, and streamline your fulfillment operations.

[If you’re using Pacejet today and haven’t explored these features yet, here’s what’s at stake: \

Retailer partners expect flawless shipping paperwork and performance. When you don’t meet expectations, shipments get flagged, delayed, or fined. Your team ends up fixing documents by hand, which nobody wants.

Pacejet’s updates keep everything aligned with partner requirements, so you can move orders out the door without second-guessing templates or reprinting labels.

Next steps: Review your retailer-specific workflows and enable the new templates in your Pacejet settings. If you ship to multiple big-box partners, start by mapping each packing list to its corresponding workflow. Test a few orders in your sandbox environment to confirm labels and documents fire automatically at the right points in your process.

Ensure Compliance with International Shipping Regulations

International documents are notoriously tricky. Small mistakes, like mismatched commodity data or unclear country-of-origin details, slow down customs and frustrate customers waiting on deliveries. These Pacejet updates help you produce cleaner, more accurate forms, so cross-border shipments clear faster and with less manual work.

Next steps: Update your international shipment profiles to use the new documentation templates. Verify that your commodity data, HTS codes, and country-of-origin fields are complete and accurate. Run a test export shipment to confirm that the new documents generate cleanly and align with your destination country’s expectations.

Automate Compliance with New Freight Rating Classifications

In 2025, freight classifications changed again, and keeping up can feel like guesswork. Misclassifications lead to audits, chargebacks, or shipment delays. With these Pacejet updates, your team gets automated, accurate class calculations that protect margins and help you stay current. Meet the latest National Motor Freight Classification (NMFC) standards without digging through dense documentation.

Next steps: Turn on Freight Density automation for a small test group of shipments first, choosing ones with mixed packaging or variable weights. Check a few examples against your carrier’s rating to confirm alignment. Once you’re confident in the classification accuracy, roll it out across all freight shipments to eliminate manual calculations.

Expand Shipping Automation and Self-Service Control

As order volume grows, even small manual decisions can slow your team down. Choosing carriers, assigning billing details, or relabeling packages one by one adds friction that multiplies across hundreds of shipments. These Pacejet automation updates give you tighter control, fewer clicks, and more consistency. That means your team can stay focused on moving orders, not managing exceptions.

Auto-select carriers and services

Use the “Set Shipment Service” rule to auto-select carriers/services based on fields like warehouse, customer type, or item class.

Auto-assign billing information

Dynamically assign billing info with the new “Set Freight Bill To by Carrier” rule—perfect for LTL/3PL setups.

Auto-label boxes based on contents

Simplify packing with the “Set Package Contents” rule, which automatically labels boxes using Product Numbers, Universal Product Codes (UPCs), or Customer Product Numbers.

Auto-clear default packaging

Automatically clear default Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packaging (like in Acumatica) with the new “Remove Shipment Packages” rule, so you don’t have to clean it up manually.

Auto-print labels with control

Improved print automation now lets you control exactly when and what to print—by package, sub-container, or handling unit. And a new printer selection tool gives you direct control over which printer is used at each step.

Next steps: Start by reviewing your most repetitive manual tasks—like relabeling packages or updating bill-to fields—and convert them into automation rules inside Pacejet. Test each new rule with a small batch to ensure accuracy. Once validated, apply them across all warehouses to standardize workflows and reduce decision-making delays.

Review Carrier Network Upgrades and Options to Expand

Carrier technology is evolving rapidly, and outdated integrations can cause slowdowns, rating errors, or missing service options. These Pacejet upgrades ensure you always have access to the latest connectivity, best performance, and broadest LTL coverage. That way, you can ship confidently without worrying about your carriers.

Next steps: If you’re using any of these carriers, review your carrier settings to confirm credentials, services, and accessorials are up to date. Run a few test shipments to validate rating and label-generation performance. If you’re expanding your carrier mix, now’s a good time to add new options supported by these upgraded integrations.

Leverage Time-Saving Usability Enhancements

Small user interface fixes save time at scale. When your team is navigating multiple screens, editing templates, or scanning for feature updates, even tiny workflow improvements add up. These enhancements make Pacejet smoother, clearer, and faster, helping your users get more done with less effort.

Next steps: Have your shipping and operations teams save their most-used screens in Favorites. Review the new terminology and test the updated Template Editor. If you rely heavily on templates, take advantage of the enhanced editor to clean up outdated formatting.

Ship Smarter and Stay Compliant in 2026

Whether you’re keeping retailer scorecards clean, speeding up shipments, or staying ahead of LTL classification changes, Descartes Pacejet helps you ship with more confidence and less manual work. It’s built to support teams that are growing fast and can’t afford delays, fines, or rework slowing them down.

If you’re already using Pacejet, take a few minutes to explore the new templates and automation options in your settings. Small adjustments now can streamline thousands of shipments later. If you’re not a Descartes customer yet, this is a great moment to see how the platform helps you reduce errors, improve compliance, and keep orders moving without adding headcount.

Ready to take the next step? Request a demo to see Pacejet in action.