ShipStation

I've used ShipStation, ShippingEasy, ShipWorks, Stamps.com, Ordoro, and SolidCommerce with a few clients. My two favorite are ShipStation and ShippingEasy. They both have different strengths - sweat the small stuff because it really makes a difference if you're shipping 200+ packages a day. It's worth using two or more systems and then picking the best. The time spent is worth the effort.

I use ShipStation for managing the shipping and customer service from my website, Amazon, Walmart, Jet, Ebay, and Etsy. The application is rock solid. Creating manual orders is simple, as is importing orders and combining shipments. I like that I can place orders on hold and setup future shipments. Other vendors like ShippingEasy cannot do this (yet). We get a fair number or orders that have a bad address and we're able to put orders on hold until we hear back from the customer. This shipping rules and kitting options are fairly robust. It is easy to identify return customers (this is something not done well by other platforms). The UI is very buttoned-up. ShipStation also has a superior "Search Customers" function that will search on 3 and 4 part names, city, state... Some of the other vendors fail here. Having good search reduces customer service time.

There are some things that ShippingEasy does better - e.g. they're a single page application and that means that the interface is super fast. ShipStation is slower as you mover around in the interface. I wish that ShipStation could manage my inventory across marketplaces and I'm in love with how some of the other vendors solicit reviews using marketing/email automation. I hope someday that vendors like ShipStation will also connect to Auth.net or Stripe.com so that we can Auth and Settle New Manual Orders. It takes a bit longer to learn ShipStation but if you're running a larger/complicated business you'll come to appreciate the power that comes with the complexity.

I like how all shipping services are available and easy to apply. Everything is easy to understand and operate. The software communicates with most selling platforms and keeps updated inventory.

I would like the pricing to be based on volume not number of platforms.

The ai chat bot was great. Very well trained. I was excited, but could only go so far before I needed a human. Then things went to hell. Never could get it working to know how well it works.

There are many problems and the labels were misleading so it was impossible to know what the real problem was. Is it a bug? Is it misconfiguration? Is it just something I don't understand because the explanations on the page weren't clear? I couldn't say and live chat was not helpful at all. He couldn't understand the simplest questions so after 2 hours of trying to get the app connected to our store, and Loom video after Loom video I made to make it easy for him to comprehend, I had to give up trying. Even though his vocabulary was large, it's pretty clear, because of his lack of comprehension, that English was not his first language. But if he knew his job, the language shouldn't have even been a problem. If the shipping app doesn't connect to your ecommerce store, and I showed him pictures to make it crystal clear (it said no shipping options), he should have been trained enough to know what to do to fix it. He didn't even understand the question.

What I liked the most was how easy it is to set up and get going It has a great UI that's extremely easy to use daily. Automations make daily life easier and rate preview is a godsend. I can go on.....

The least that I like about this software is that they HAVE the ability to suggest features and updates, however, I don't really see too many of them actually be implemented. Now, that's not saying they don't implement any - but there are some pretty important ones that have a ton of upvotes that tech devs have said would be relatively easy to do, but they don't. Maybe there is something I just don't know...