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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 Descartes Pacejet 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:
- 10–30% lower shipping costs from smarter rate shopping and accurate freight classing.
- Up to 80% labor reduction from automating shipping paperwork, packing logic, and carrier selection.
- 3x faster fulfillment with fewer errors, less back-and-forth, and better compliance built in.
It’s time to update your shipping playbook for 2026. Let’s review the top Pacejet platform upgrades, why they matter, and next steps for your team.
Improve Compliance with Retailer Partners
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.
- New packing list templates for Sam’s Club®, Costco®, Home Depot® Canada, and Rona make it easy to meet partner formats—no manual edits required.
- SSCC-based scanning: GS1 label templates for cartons, pallets, and sub-containers now include Code 128B barcodes that support Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC)-based scanning.
- Enhanced print automation lets you trigger paperwork at just the right time—like when scan-packing a pallet or completing a shipment.
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.
- New US, Mexico or Canada (USMCA) Certificate of Origin template groups details by Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) code and origin, meeting trade documentation requirements.
- Revamped Shipper’s Letter of Instruction includes commodity data and package-level visibility with domestic/foreign (D/F) indicators to reduce customs delays.
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.
- Freight Density Automation: Now supports sub-codes 01–13 (updated per 2025 NMFC standards).
- Auto-Classification: Pacejet automatically calculates the correct freight classification based on dimensions, weight, and cube—even for consolidated shipments.
- Guided Setup: Walks you through the correct setup steps to ensure everything is dialed in before activation.
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 Pacjet 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.
- FedEx: Completely new FedEx integration built on their latest RESTful APIs—delivering better performance and long-term stability.
- WWEX: New Worldwide Express (WWEX) integration for LTL—built using their updated API to support modern freight workflows.
- Averitt: Upgraded to new APIs for improved LTL service management and reliability.
- LTL: Key enhancements across top carriers like ODFL, R+L Carriers, SAIA, Purolator, Manitoulin, and more, keeping pace with their latest tech and service offerings.
- 3PL: Integration improvements with leaders like Echo, Total Freight Worldwide (TFWW), C.H. Robinson, BlueGrace, and others—giving you more coverage and better options.
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.
- Favorites Menu: Now easier to find and use, so your most-used screens are always one click away.
- Self-Service Template Editor: Got more powerful with new tools for cell merging and vertical alignment to make formatting shipping templates faster.
- In-App Release Notifications: Let you know when new features are live, right from the Pacejet title bar.
- Terminology: Standardized across the UI and API, replacing “Item” with “Product,” “Container” with “Package,” and “Special Service” with “Shipment Service.”
- Platform Performance: If your account uses lots of custom data, we’ve boosted platform performance to keep things moving smoothly.
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.