Jeff Tedmori built E-Fish on a simple promise: the freshest catch, delivered from dock to doorstep before most grocery stores even get their weekly restock. When you're shipping raw fish across the continental US and the margin between "fresh" and "garbage" is measured in hours, you don't get second chances. A spoiled box isn't just a refund — it's a customer who tells ten people never to order from you.
This is how ShipFare helped E-Fish cut their average transit time from 2 days down to 1 — at the same shipping cost — while eliminating spoilage losses and opening up international markets they'd been turning away for over a year.
Last updated: April 2026
Who Is E-Fish?
Jeff Tedmori founded E-Fish as a marketplace connecting commercial fishermen and small-scale seafood vendors directly with consumers. The whole pitch is freshness and traceability. Customers see where their fish was caught, who caught it, how many hours ago it left the water. It's a compelling product — but that kind of promise falls apart instantly if the shipping doesn't hold up its end.
By the time Jeff reached out to us, E-Fish was doing well. The brand was growing, repeat orders were strong, and they had more demand than they could handle from Canada and the UK. But the shipping operation? That was a different story. Jeff put it pretty bluntly: his team was spending more time wrestling with carrier portals than actually growing the business.
The Shipping Challenge
If you've never shipped raw seafood DTC, here's the short version: it's brutal. Fish has to stay below 38°F from the vendor's hands to the customer's kitchen. There's no grace period. Once seafood crosses into the temperature danger zone above 40°F, bacteria multiply fast, and within a few hours the product is done.
E-Fish had a few problems stacking on top of each other, and they were all making each other worse.
Too Many Portals, Not Enough Hours
The marketplace model is great for variety — customers can order salmon from Alaska and shrimp from the Gulf in the same cart. But it means shipments originate from vendors all over the country, each with their own carrier accounts and pickup windows. Jeff's ops team was logging into separate portals for FedEx, UPS, and a couple regional carriers every single morning. Just getting the day's shipments out the door was eating 3–4 hours before anyone touched vendor onboarding or customer support.
Finding Out About Spoilage the Hard Way
Here's what was really costing them money: they had no centralized way to track shipments across carriers. So when a package got stuck at a hub or rerouted, nobody at E-Fish knew until the customer opened the box and found warm fish. Every one of those incidents meant a full refund, a replacement order shipped overnight, and usually a customer who never came back. Jeff told us it was happening multiple times a week during summer months.
Carrier Insurance That Doesn't Actually Cover Anything
This one surprised Jeff, and it surprises most perishable brands. Standard declared value coverage from FedEx and UPS explicitly excludes spoilage. Read the fine print — if FedEx delays your package by 18 hours and the lobster arrives at room temperature, that's on you. E-Fish was eating the full cost of every spoiled shipment out of their own margins. Weather delays, hub misroutes, all of it — 100% their problem.
International Orders Going Unanswered
Jeff kept getting emails from customers in Toronto and London asking if they could order. He wanted to say yes. But shipping perishables across borders means customs paperwork, country-specific food safety licenses, cold chain carriers that actually operate internationally, and about a dozen other things you don't think about until you're in the weeds. He'd looked into it a couple times and shelved it both times. Too complicated without a partner who'd done it before.
What ShipFare Built for E-Fish
We didn't just plug E-Fish into a shipping platform and call it a day. Jeff's operation had specific constraints — multi-vendor origins, perishable timelines, zero tolerance for delays — so we built around those constraints. Here's what that looked like in practice.
One Dashboard for Everything
First priority: get rid of the portal juggling. We pulled FedEx, UPS, and their regional carriers into a single ShipFare dashboard. Every vendor's shipments, regardless of where they're shipping from or which carrier they prefer, all visible in one place. Jeff's ops person went from spending half the morning on carrier logistics to handling it in about 30 minutes. That's not an exaggeration — they timed it.
Smart Routing via API
E-Fish's marketplace model doesn't fit neatly into most shipping software. Orders come in from buyers, but fulfillment happens at the vendor level — different locations, different products, different carrier availability. We built a custom API integration that takes all of that into account and routes each order to the best carrier and service level automatically. A lobster order from a vendor in Maine going to Phoenix? The system knows that FedEx Priority Overnight from that zip code gets there by 10:30 AM and costs $4 less than UPS Next Day Air from the same origin. It picks FedEx. No one has to think about it.
This is actually the piece that let us get Jeff's transit times from a 2-day average down to 1 day — without increasing his shipping spend. It wasn't about upgrading every shipment to overnight. It was about being smarter with routing. A lot of E-Fish's shipments were already going to destinations that could receive next-day delivery from the right carrier, but they were defaulting to 2-day because that's what the vendor had set up. The routing engine just made better choices at scale.
Perishable Insurance That Actually Pays
We added perishable-specific shipping insurance to every qualifying shipment. This isn't the standard carrier coverage with the perishable exclusion buried on page 14. This covers temperature failures, carrier delays, weather events, misrouted packages — the stuff that actually happens to seafood shipments. Claims get filed automatically based on tracking data. No phone trees, no adjusters, no "we'll get back to you in 6–8 weeks." Jeff went from absorbing every spoilage loss to having them covered within days.
Catching Problems Before Customers Do
This one changed how Jeff's team operates day-to-day. Instead of finding out about a failed shipment when an angry customer calls, they get a late shipment alert the moment FedEx or UPS pushes back the expected delivery date. Shipment from a Memphis hub now arriving Saturday instead of Thursday? They know within minutes of the carrier update, not two days later when the box arrives warm. That gives them time to reach out proactively — "Hey, we noticed your order got delayed, we've already shipped a replacement" — which turns a potential disaster into a customer loyalty moment. Jeff says that feature alone changed how customers talk about E-Fish in reviews.
International Shipping Without the Headache
We handled the compliance side of opening Canada and the UK — the Safe Food for Canadians License, CFIA labeling requirements, customs documentation templates, international dry ice compliance (which has its own set of carrier-specific rules), and carrier selection for cross-border cold chain. Jeff didn't hire anyone. Didn't bring on a consultant. His existing team handles international orders the same way they handle domestic ones — through the same dashboard, with the compliance handled automatically in the background.
Results
Key Outcomes
- Average transit time2 days → 1 day
- Shipping cost change$0 (cost neutral)
- Spoilage lossesFully insured
- Carrier platforms consolidated3+ → 1
- New international marketsCanada & UK
- Ops hires neededZero
The transit time improvement is the number Jeff brings up the most. Going from 2-day average to next-day delivery — without spending a dollar more on shipping — completely changed E-Fish's competitive position. Customers noticed. Reviews started mentioning delivery speed unprompted. Repeat order rates went up.
On the operations side, the consolidation gave Jeff's team their time back. Shipping went from a daily fire drill to something that mostly runs itself. They step in for edge cases — unusual destinations, oversized orders, the occasional vendor who forgets to print a label — but the routine stuff just flows.
Canada launched about six weeks after onboarding. UK took a bit longer because of additional food safety paperwork, but both markets are live now and growing. Jeff didn't have to bring on an international logistics person — his existing team handles it through the same workflows they use for domestic orders.
Lessons for Perishable DTC Brands
We've worked with a lot of perishable brands at this point, and Jeff's experience at E-Fish follows a pattern we see constantly. A few things worth calling out if your brand is hitting similar walls:
Carrier fragmentation will break you eventually
At 20 shipments a day, juggling multiple carrier portals is annoying but manageable. At 100+, it's a staffing problem. At 200+, you're making mistakes — missed cutoff times, suboptimal carrier selection, packages going out on 2-day service when overnight was available for $3 more. Jeff's situation wasn't unusual. It's where every multi-vendor perishable brand ends up if they don't consolidate early.
Your carrier insurance almost certainly doesn't cover spoilage
Read the exclusions on your FedEx or UPS declared value coverage. Perishable goods are excluded. Full stop. Dedicated perishable insurance exists specifically because the standard stuff doesn't work for anything temperature-sensitive. Every brand we talk to is surprised by this. Don't be the one who finds out after a $2,000 loss.
Catching a delay 6 hours early changes everything
There's a world of difference between proactively emailing a customer — "we see your order got held up, a fresh replacement is already on its way" — and waiting for them to open a warm box and leave a one-star review. The first one builds loyalty. The second one shows up on Google forever. Late shipment alerts aren't a nice-to-have. For perishables, they're table stakes.
International is more doable than you think
Yes, the compliance paperwork is real — food safety licenses, labeling rules, customs forms, carrier-specific dry ice limits. It's a lot. But it's a one-time setup. Once the infrastructure is in place, international orders flow through the same system as domestic ones. If you've got customers asking whether you ship to Canada, the answer should probably be "yes" a lot sooner than most brands make it.