Most fulfillment operations treat “domestic shipping” as a synonym for “continental US shipping.” The rest of the country (Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, and military addresses worldwide) ends up in a different bucket: slower, more manual, and handled by a patchwork of static carrier rules that no one particularly likes.
For brands that ship to customers across the full US, this gap has real consequences. A customer in Honolulu who orders the same product as a customer in Chicago doesn’t understand why their package arrives a week later on a surface vessel. The brand doesn’t have a great answer. And the fulfillment operation running in the background didn’t design the problem. It inherited it from the way USPS routes non-continental freight.
ShipMonk Economy now covers every US address. Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, and APO/FPO/DPO military addresses all route through the same service your team already uses for the continental US, with delivery windows roughly cut in half compared to today. This post explains what was happening before, what changed, and what it means operationally for your fulfillment workflow.
The gap that existed
Before this expansion, orders to outlying US addresses routed through static USPS services, not through ShipMonk Economy’s optimization layer. Static routing means exactly what it sounds like: whatever USPS service was on the label was what the package got, regardless of weight, destination, or time of year. No carrier optimization. No alternative routing logic. No way to improve the outcome.
The weight threshold made this worse in practice. USPS Ground Advantage (the default surface service for non-continental addresses) ships anything over one pound by boat. A 2 lb parcel to Honolulu would transit by surface vessel and typically take 7-10 days to arrive. The same package going to a continental address would be there in two or three days.
The operational effect for merchants: every outlying order took the slow, manual path, regardless of whether a faster option existed. Customers on the receiving end experienced longer wait times with no obvious explanation. And merchants couldn’t fix it through their own fulfillment configuration because the routing was static. There was no lever to pull.
What changed
ShipMonk Economy now covers all ten outlying US address categories:
- AK · HI · PR (Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico)
- GU · VI · AS · MP (Guam, US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas)
- AA · AE · AP (APO, FPO, and DPO military addresses)
All of these now route through the same ShipMonk Economy service level as continental US orders. One submission path, one label, one set of fulfillment rules, regardless of whether the destination is Brooklyn or Barrigada.
The three specific problems this eliminates: submission errors on outlying addresses that previously triggered edge-case rejections; the need for separate carrier selection logic for non-continental destinations; and the fallback rules that brands had stitched together to handle Alaska and Hawaii differently from everything else. All of that collapses into a single service.
The carrier behind it: International Bridge
The carrier making this possible is International Bridge, an air-injection carrier now powering ShipMonk Economy to every outlying US address.
The mechanics are straightforward. When an order ships to a non-continental destination, the parcel moves by air from a US gateway to a hub near the destination, then drops into a local last-mile carrier for final delivery. Air injection, local DDU handoff. Not a surface vessel.
This matters most for heavier parcels, which were previously guaranteed to go by boat under USPS Ground Advantage. With International Bridge, air routing applies across all weight classes. The result is delivery windows that are roughly 50% shorter than today’s static USPS routing, with no change to your submission workflow. Your team picks ShipMonk Economy and we handle the routing automatically.
What the performance data shows
The delivery improvements are substantial across all destination categories.
For non-continental US addresses (Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico), average delivery time drops from 6.9 days today to 2.8 days with International Bridge via ShipMonk Economy. The share of orders delivered within five days improves from 51.7% to 95.8%.
For territories (Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas), average delivery drops from 10.3 days to 4.4 days. The five-day delivery rate goes from 44.2% to 80.4%.
For APO/FPO/DPO military addresses routed through AA, AE, and AP, average delivery drops from 9.4 days to 5.4 days, with the five-day delivery rate improving from 23.3% to 60.5%.
New service performance is carrier-reported; current ShipMonk benchmarks sourced from Q4 2025 actuals.
The military address improvement deserves a note. APO/FPO/DPO addresses route through the Department of Defense postal system, which introduces coordination points that don’t exist for commercial addresses. The gains are meaningful (9.4 days to 5.4 days is a real improvement) but somewhat constrained by the structure of the military mail system, not by the carrier handoff.
Same workflow. Bigger map.
The operational implication that matters most for merchants already running on ShipMonk Economy: nothing changes on your end.
Outlying orders flow through the exact same submission path as any continental order. There’s no special handling flag, no alternate SKU for Alaska, no separate carrier selection step for Guam. If the address is a valid US address, ShipMonk Economy routes it. Your team doesn’t need to know whether a destination is continental or non-continental. The service handles that distinction automatically.
For brands with fulfillment rules that currently branch based on destination type (one path for CONUS, another for OCONUS or territories), those branches can be simplified. The patchwork of USPS Ground Advantage, USPS Priority, manual carrier selection, and fallback logic that previously handled outlying addresses all folds into a single service level.
This is the operational outcome that gets underappreciated in conversations about carrier coverage: the complexity reduction isn’t just about transit time. It’s about removing conditional logic from fulfillment workflows, eliminating edge-case rejection handling, and making the outbound operation more consistent regardless of where customers happen to live.
What this means for your customers
Shipping time is the most visible part of the fulfillment experience for customers, in a way that packaging, accuracy, and inventory availability generally aren’t. Customers in Honolulu or San Juan who’ve been waiting 7-10 days for orders that ship in 2-3 days to a continental address are experiencing a service gap that’s hard to explain and hard to defend.
Closing that gap doesn’t just improve customer satisfaction metrics. It removes a class of “where is my order” inquiries that stem from outlying-specific delays rather than anything wrong with the fulfillment operation. For brands with significant customer bases in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, or among military families, the reduction in transit-time-driven support contact is a real operational benefit.
There’s also a less obvious implication for conversion and repeat purchase. Longer delivery windows on some destinations quietly suppress demand and repurchase rates in those markets. Brands that have written off outlying US as a lower-performing geography may be looking at an artifact of shipping time rather than a genuine preference difference.
Getting started
If you’re a current ShipMonk merchant, activation is straightforward. No SKU changes, no workflow changes. Talk to your Merchant Success Manager (MSM) to confirm pricing for your account and flip the switch. If you’re evaluating ShipMonk as a fulfillment partner and outlying US coverage matters to your business, get in touch with our team and we’ll walk you through what the service looks like for your specific destination mix.
