17 years helping British businesses
choose better software
ShipStation
What is ShipStation?
ShipStation Order Management software helps you organize your ecommerce orders easily and effectively. ShipStation provides several ways to manage all of your online orders and automate the many tasks associated with order fulfillment. Gain complete control and insight into all of your orders at every stage of the shipping process regardless of the original selling channel. Save time by automatically applying actions to orders based on the criteria you set.
Who Uses ShipStation?
ShipStation is a web-based shipping software that was designed for multichannel businesses. Anyone who sells on multiple platforms (eBay, Amazon, etc.) & ships physical goods can save time & money.
Not sure about ShipStation?
Compare with a popular alternative
ShipStation
Reviews of ShipStation
Alternatives Considered:
The solution I've been searching for
Comments: I have found the customer support to be more than excellent and that it is included within the 30-day trial period. Special mention to my customer support agent, [sensitive content hidden]. His knowledge of the system and platford is very good, as is his attitude and patience.
Pros:
The user interface, the dashboard and ease of the settings.
Cons:
Can't think of any. Keep up the great work
Alternatives Considered:
Best in class order management, but inventory management is flawed
Comments: Positive. I've tried numerous competitors, but keep coming back to shipstation for just doing the business of shipping things flawlessly. If they would add inventory syncing and kitting/bundling, this product would be literal perfection.
Pros:
The workflows, batching, labelling, general UI and UX and the user-centric engineering make it obvious this was designed by product managers who have done ecommerce, rather than their competitors who are software engineers first and have no clue what store owners actually want.
Cons:
The inventory managenet is one way; anything you sell on any channel will decrement Shipstation's inventpry, but it won't then push the new stock count out to connected stores. Also therefore no support for kitting and bundling. They recommend you check out other integration partners but most of those cost 300+ per month which is 6x what I'm paying for Shipstation. They have competitors who offer these features free or cheap, but the competitors lack in the order/shipping management features.
Shipstation is great software for the price, but it has its limitations
Comments: Shipstation is great, but as you scale out your business you will most likely need to move to a more robust WMS. For many start up companies that do not have a lot of inventory or a high volume of SKU's, Shipstation will provide a powerful tool that can help speed up fulfillment and release many of the frustration of shipping product while not costing you huge amounts of money.
Pros:
Shipstation is great for companies that are looking for a label printing solution for there shopping carts. Shipstation is able to handle high volumes of orders and allows for labels to be pre-printed, which can greatly increase the fulfillment time. There are pretty good filtering options that can lead to more efficiencies when printing that can save time with your fulfillment team. Shipstation integrates with many different platforms fairly seamlessly, which allows for more diversity in the ever growing number of platforms that are out there. They are also constantly adding new platforms that can integrated with. I think the fact that this software is user friendly and efficient in its design makes this software a worthwhile investment for those that need a better shipping solution.
Cons:
The issues that we have run into with this software as we have scaled to processing over 3000 shipments a day are too many holes which can cause many opportunities for errors, processing speeds, and lack of flexibility. When you are processing up to 3000 orders a day problems flesh themselves out quickly. One issue that has arisen is the inability to hold people accountable when errors occur. For example, since the labels are pre-printed there is not a simple to way to know who misshiped an order when it is sent incorrectly to a customer. On top of that, since the labels are pre-print there is no way to verify through software on the outbound that a shipment is correct. You have to trust that your team is packing order correctly, which is guaranteed to cause problems regardless. There is also the possibility that labels can be double printed or not printed at all since labels are processed and then a PDF is created to print orders. This has been costly for us an multiple occasions, which is hardly preventable no matter who you have printing. Due to the fact that Shipstation is cloud based this can cause issues with processing speeds. We have seen hang ups (especially on Mondays) that cause the whole team to be slowed down due. The other issue with cloud based system is the lack of flexibility for Shipstation to be customized to how you would like it. If changes are made they have to be made globally, which can take a while or just simply cannot happen altogether.
Alternatives Considered:
Works Okay, Remote printing issues
Comments: I wouldn't not recommend using ShipStation, but the integration with the Rollo printer was annoying, specifically on the Mac. It didn't have issues integrating with ecommerce platforms like Shopify or Amazon, and was reliable for sending the correct data and receiving the full and accurate orders.
Pros:
It integrated well with Shopify, Walmart.com, Etsy, eBay and Amazon.
Cons:
It had connection issues with the remote printing option and Rollo. I would have to frequently disconnect and reconnect the software. The cost jumps up rapidly after 50 orders, and during my off season, if I'd forget to downgrade, I would pay a lot for services I wasn't using
Alternatives Considered:
We love ship station
Comments: We love it …my sales team uses it. I use it. I track with it. We use it each day. We save money with it. It’s pretty user friendly. Can’t live without it now.
Pros:
It’s pretty awesome. We had trouble before we found this with high shipping rates. This product saved us money and gave us a great way to manage and integrate all our shipping and orders. We are grateful.
Cons:
Nothing. Even the customer service chat is good - ideally I’d like a phone number for customer service but that’s ok.