This is not a weird question at all. Here's what I've tried and have had a lot of success with, in my experience, and best of all, option one gives you free access to the negotiated rates with accounts you own and option two has no additional cost beyond postage or shipping rates by a community account.

Option one, if you want your own UPS account with the same rates as Amazon, look up Rollo Ship Manager and sign up for an account there. Add UPS as a carrier and they'll create an account for you with the Rollo affiliated discount (which is the same rate setup for Amazon). They also happen to tie into Amazon's pending order system and you can print all of your labels through them, if you'd like. Rollo does charge a per label charge to use their system, or you can use the UPS site directly, for no additional cost. This allows YOU to manage issues and not be lost in the shuffle between UPS and Amazon.

Option two, if you don't necessarily want your own account but want cheap rates for both USPS and UPS (which are the same as what Amazon offers), you can look up Pirate Ship and create an account with them. The customer service is beyond excellent and they even take care of the claims process when there's an issue with UPS shipments (which is a game changer as Amazon and UPS don't see eye to eye on who should do what and we are caught in the middle with no real recourse). I am a daily user of this option to deal with the Amazon reships as the Amazon Seller platform does not account for this (ever increasing) scenario.

In each of the options above, you'll end up paying for postage up front.

Hope this helps!

-Beau