ShipStation Reviews

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

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.

Very poor software design and way of doing business

Comments: Very poor experience. Never could get the right answers from support either. Seems like a company that really doesn't care about small businesses and customer support.

Pros:

It was a way to print shipping labels in one place for multiple carriers.

Cons:

They made you prepay for labels in certain $ increments before you could print labels, so you always have money tied up hoping to be able to use it sometime. Will only be able to ship FedEx and UPS if you have current account with them and can get the software to work together with your existing account. Not very user friendly compared to Pirate Ship.

Stores and order management

Comments: I find it easy to use and a great way to have all of your marketplaces centralized to assist your shipping team or your customers, we have various ways to locate an order and edit it to our needs.

Pros:

Once you do your basic set up you can start to keep track of your orders and for a long time, we can go back and edit orders from years back in case something new pops up with customer service

Cons:

Since it is a web page it can fail and make your process stop.Sometimes the cache on your account makes it slow to check on order if you have high volume (customer support can assist on this).now that they are testing their new look sometims old SS can be hard to work and you ahve to go to the new look, and viceversa.

Good Platform to work on your e-commerce orders.

Comments: Works great to get all your orders fulfilled. We are very satisfied with that aspect. We do not intend to change away from it.

Pros:

The easy to gather all the orders from different selling channels into one tool. No extra entering of shipping information and I like how it does verify all your addresses.

Cons:

The Magento Module has issues. Live Rates do not just transfer from Shipstation to the website. It ends up being $0 for shipping that gets charged to our customers. I had to deactivate that functionality.

Necessary to get ship done!

Comments: Totally necessary for our small business to ship our cosmetic products with ShipStation. Couldn't have run our business without it.

Pros:

I loved how easily it integrated with our Squarespace shop. We used Shipstation to print labels and to manage which orders we shipped. The label-making was flexible enough for us and let us be a little custom with a brand logo. Was also great how it worked with UPS, FedEx, and all the other shipping types. Customer service was always quite helpful and easy to access.

Cons:

I remember going back a forth a lot between Shipstation and Squarespace and wishing more was integrated into Shipstation so that I could just stay on that platform.

ShipStation for B2B (Parcel/LTL/FTL)

Comments: Overall, ShipStation has been a successful solution for our team - allowing us to cut down on lead times and expedite important orders

Pros:

Ease of use - it is very easy to train new team member as the system is intuitive. We have been able to create custom tags that allow our team to gain more detail into orders to ensure the shipping method is best for the order.

Cons:

Splitting shipment can be difficult to manage and often fail to fulfil correctly in our connected ERP system. We have increased our freight shipments, tracking and booking we have had to do outside of ShipStation for these orders.

Great product, but room for impreovement

Pros:

I love that ShipStation is fully integrated with PayPal, no extra steps required. Also have the option to purchase flats envelope pricing, which isn't offered through most platforms. This can be a downside for inexperienced users who select this shipping class not realizing it does not include tracking and should not be used for packages.

Cons:

The user interface could use some improvement. Compared to competitors, shipstation is much more cumbersome to view the status of all outgoing shipments at a glance. Instead, I have to click on each shipment individually to view delivery information. Would also like the option to generate a qr code for those times when I do not have access to a printer.

shipping and order fulfillment solution

Pros:

The ability to integrate with various carriers and compare rates is a significant advantage, allowing businesses to choose the best shipping options.

Cons:

Basic inventory management may not suffice for businesses with complex inventory needs.

Shipstation - Save tons of time and money

Comments: Great, very affordable and saved me from wasting my life in lines at the post office.

Pros:

Easy to set up, great customer service and support!

Cons:

A bit of a learning curve but luckily customer service guided me through.

I'm done.

Comments: Shipping software is supposed to make shipping easy this software is a frustrating waste of time.

Pros:

It worked great until they did an update to the interface now it's worthless.

Cons:

I have used ShipStation for years they did an update about a year ago and it all went to shit after that, I constantly have to reset the printer to recognize the software and now I have spent an hour trying to print a label with no success. For some reason they are double entering sales so I have to delete one so it doesn't throw the totals out of wack. Looking up shipped packages some don't show up even though it was shipped. My clients are not receiving a tracking # email so I have to answer the "Where's my stuff email. Done.

Shipstation brings all your shipping needs to one platform

Comments: Shipstation allowed us to use one account and centralize the online order fulfillment process with one platform, to easily manage package shipments from multiple order systems and using multiple shipping accounts (USPS, FedEx, etc.).

Pros:

I absoutely love using shipstation to manage multiple ecommerce platforms with the ability to fulfill orders, print labels and organize all within one platform.

Cons:

As shopify has expanded, it was tough at times to manage fulfillment from multiple locations within shipstation. over time we were able to figure it out but it took some time.

Love Shipstation

Comments: Overall, Shipstation is great for companies who have a simple shipping structure.

Pros:

Shipstation has been great for managing our shipments for our smaller businesses! It's very simple to use and integrates with both Shopify and Klaviyo.

Cons:

There's not enough robust sorting/filtering features. I'd like to be able to have some of my shipments be filtered into different buckets and Shipstation doesn't have the ability to do this. If you have a complex shipping system Shipstation wouldn't be for you.

Versatile, stable, a reliable shipping partner for every business large or small

Comments: made possible to scale up my shipping operation

Pros:

Helping me ship products out the door fast and mistake-free at least cost

Cons:

The Shipping Label screen has a lot of helpful detail but causes clutter and much of it can or should be hidden until needed

With ShipStation, I know there is someone on the other end that cares about my experience

Pros:

• I was assigned a specific person as my customer service representative, and when I called with an issue, one of the customer rep picked up the phone and answered my question on the spot; meaning, I didn't have to dial a ton of menu options or wait on hold at all to speak with a person. She is also very responsive to emails. We tend to look at websites and applications as faceless businesses, but with ShipStation I know there is someone on the other end that cares about my experience. • Integrates seamlessly with Squarespace Commerce account • Automatically marks order fulfilled when a shipping label is printed • Connects to printer easier than Stamps.com

Cons:

• Have to load balances instead of paying for what you use as you go. I encountered this with Stamps.com as well, but it is annoying because I have to make cash flow considerations when all I need is a few extra dollars to print a label. • Cannot edit manual orders, need to delete and re-create an order if changing quantity or amount of a product. • I "chose" ShipStation because it was the only shipping option that would integrate with Squarespace. Most of my issues were encountered while trying to transition from Stamps.com to become familiar with the new platform. Though very similar, ShipStation INITIALLY felt like a clunkier, gaudier version of the same thing. Thankfully, they've recently made some positive design changes. However, there are still some quirky user interface aspects, including: — animated "help/info" bubbles (which I just figured out how to hide). — In Stamps.com, I was able to see if my thermal printer was connected (or visible to the website) before clicking "print" — which, when I click, charges the postage to my account regardless if the label actually printed. In ShipStation, I have to click "print" without knowing if the website is able to send the job to the printer. This has resulted in additional postage billed to my account because I clicked "print." I then have to wait for that amount to be refunded in my account. Though I should add, I rarely have printer connection issues with ShipStation, whereas it used to be the bane of my Stamps.com experience. — Stamps.com also made it easy to see all the USPS shipping options and rates at a glance, while viewing an order. In ShipStation, I either have to select a service, then an option from within that service or open up a separate rate calculator. This makes it harder to find the lowest shipping fee/service or fastest method for its value when modifying individual orders.

V2 Is A Near-Perfect SaaS. V3 Is Half-Baked

Comments: As I already mentioned, I love ShipStation. It's really one of my favorite pieces of SaaS. Their customer support is also great. They answer their live chats and emails quickly and always have a solution. Rare, especially for the price of admission.

Pros:

The interface in ShipStation V2 is fantastic. As the department manager, I can easily assign orders to my CSR's and use tags to designate anything I want. We use different tags/colors for suppliers, whether we are shipping ourselves or dropshipping, or marking things as HOT! Using the tags to filter, makes it easy to find and sort orders and see what needs to be worked on. We also use the custom fields for notating PO #'s, which supplier we dropshipped from, and sometimes other important notes. The interface is so easy on the eyes and the filtering are so good that we use ShipStation instead of ChannelAdvisor to handle our orders. Another great feature is ShipStation Connect, which allows us to print to anyone's printer, even if they are not on the same network. Fantastic feature, especially, if not everyone has a Zebra printer at their station.

Cons:

I wish we could interface with our website. Right now, we're using it with the marketplaces, but our website is on its own, which is unfortunate, because we lose all of that monitoring functionality. The other con is V3. We tried it. It's very much not ready for prime time. It was buggy. The interface was not as good and the user experience was lacking. What we could do in V2 with a few keystrokes and the Tab key, took several more clicks. We're hoping they fix that up, before forcing the "upgrade."

Almost half of my 3000 orders came back as "not enough postage"

Comments: Terrible. Insulting. Their answer was an irrelevant statement that I should then choose a different setting. No acknowledgement of the situation they created. They should have made the correct recommendation before the 3000 products were prepared for shipping

Pros:

What would ShipStation do if 3000 of your orders got returned due to incorrect shipping? Shipping that was chosen from Shipstation software and verbally verified? Absolutely nothing. Visit BBB and you'll see that I filed a complaint months ago and the case has been closed due to unresponsive communication and in their words "not knowing what to do" from Shipstation. There is a list of events below for reference This was the final communication with ShipStation. It was their turn to respond and they did not. 1- On 4/9/21 products were ready to be dropped off at the post office but it was rejected due to the pricing of the stamps and the thickness of the package 2- Although the ShipStation labels verified the cost and dimensions for Letter Size 5 by 4 by 1 inch at .51 cents, the labels had to be reprinted, products repackaged with less insulation. 3- Help was hired for the packaging and re-packaging of all the products at $12/hr for 2 employees. 4- Shipstation had no solution. In fact, my account rep’s exact words were: “ I don’t know what to do.” and referred us to Stamps.com 5- Stamps website suggested the use of the setting for Large Envelope size 5 by 4 by .75 inches for $1.00. 6- Since the envelopes were getting run through a machine with disregard for the size indicated on ShipStation, the product was ruined for a lot of customers. This product had to be fulfilled again and shipped.

Cons:

Customer service and Shipstation software are not informed of the correct setting / pricing of shipping a product. The settings chosen by Shipstation software and recommended by Customer service were wrong. The post office would not accept the packages that were verified multiple times by Shipstation.

Functional, reliable, affordable

Comments: ShipStation provides an incredibly affordable and reliable shipping software platform with nice options for customizing user view, email templates, and reports. Setup is very quick and customer support via chat has been very responsive in my experience. The only drawback in my experience has been the inability to automatically rate shop different carriers on an order by order basis.

Pros:

The user interface is great providing the info that the user required where it is needed while avoiding clutter. Additionall,y the setting and administration functions are streamlined and functional.

Cons:

Rate shopping among different shipping carriers is cumbersome and not able to be automated in the system. If you primarily ship with a single provider, it is not much of an issue but if you like to shop for rates from different providers on an order-by-order basis, you will find this software slows you down because you must manually select each shipping method and compare rates manually rather than being able to select automatically based on business rules or logic around cost, delivery time, etc.

Great product, good customer service, some initial printing speed issues

Comments: Good implementation experience, good usage, and good customer support. some minor label speed issues were eventually resolved, and the solution helped the business to scale tenfold which they could simply not have done without it.

Pros:

Easy to implement, we used a 3rd party to help integrate with Sage200 and the data flow worked very well indeed, not immediate but fast enough for the business to get the order data via Sage200 into ShipStation, and integration with multiple couriers was simple. Customer service was helpful and did their best to help with every issue we had.

Cons:

We had a number of label printing speed issues that despite best efforts the ShipStation customer service and tech support were unable to resolve - we eventually found out that we needed network label printers instead of USB printers as the USB caused a bottleneck, but it took a long time and a lot of testing to get to this conclusion.

Tremendous asset for customers and businesses alike

Comments: Smooth integration and roll-out. After all the applicable data is in, things have been running smoothly since. Very happy with how this works for our business!

Pros:

Shipstation is able to connect directly with my eCommerce site and makes getting packages out the door a breeze. As long as you take the time to setup the parameters, there is rarely, if ever, an issue. My customers get an automatic email with the tracking information (that is on a branded page...not the carrier's page!) and we get emails letting us know that the item has been delivered safely. Its such a time saver and everything comes through looking incredibly professional. Small to medium sized operations will benefit greatly from this.

Cons:

The only critique I have is that we are not able to effectively communicate the (actual) added cost of insurance and/or delivery confirmation from our eCommerce software to ShipStation. We get around this by adding a percentage handling amount onto higher value items so that we're not losing money on the shipping cost for these pieces of merchandise.

Terrible customer support for buggy software

Comments: One problem is that it fails to notify the original store that the order has been shipped unless I manually ask it to make the order as complete. (Otherwise, it sits in my list of orders "awaiting shipment". Sometimes they disappear from the list, then reappear a day or two later. When I manually mark the order as "Complete", it then double counts the shipment. I have a plan that allows 50 shipments per month. So when I reached 25 shipments, it double counted them as 50 shipments and would not allow any further shipments without upgrading to the 500 shipment per month plan (which I don't need and can't afford). There is basically no telephone support from Shipstation and email support is absurdly slow and unhelpful, with each response taking a few days. This is a time-sensitive business so this is really a problem. I asked them for phone support - finally heard back with an offer for phone support 3 days from now during a time when I am not available. So basically I can count on waiting a few more days for the next useless support email.

Pros:

I liked the fact that this software synced with online sales through places like Amazon and initially seemed to work pretty well.

Cons:

A few months ago, Shipstation released a new version and I have had many problems with it. It simply does not work as advertised. Things that were seamless before no longer work. The fact that they have not fixed these issues after a few months is very frustrating. I would not recommend them any longer for shipping.

Room for Improvement on what could be a great product

Pros:

It has a fairly easy operating face that makes training simple. Easy and simple shipments rarely if ever, have issues.

Cons:

There is nowhere to be able to input a weight of a shipping carton itself to help with calculations of when something will be too heavy to go via a certain shipping services which has led to some overcharging later down the road. There are several features that have been requested through the threads that devs neither respond to, nor seem inclined to implement. To use all the possible features, you have to switch back and forth between the old layout and new layout, and this is not a simple toggle feature.

great software almost perfect

Comments: it is great. we are using it every day. I wish I could talk to someone to make things easier.

Pros:

easy to use, has many reports, many integrations with other programs and seems like they are working constantly on more.

Cons:

no phone calls to customer service I need to set up the inventory differently and not sure how it can be done.

An absolute staple for any e-commerce business.

Comments: After trying just about everything else out there, Shipstation is as close to a perfect solution as you'll find. It helped me save over an hour each day, time that I was then able to spend on actually growing my business. It was a stretch to think of anything I didn't like - which speaks volumes about the software.

Pros:

Integration with most major platforms and channels - it communicates back and forth between your Shopify, Amazon, eBay, etc. accounts to mark orders shipped and email the customer. Discounted shipping labels - The subscription pays for itself with how inexpensive the labels are. Automated tracking emails - create your own template and look the part of other major e-commerce stores.

Cons:

Can get a little confusing when dealing with international shipments but their support team is definitely top notch and can help you sort out the issues quickly.

Excellent shipping software for ecommerce businesses

Comments: Shipstation has been amazing at helping streamline our order processing and shipping. It has worked great despite the growth of business and has scaled seamlessly.

Pros:

Easily track and ship orders from multiple channels. Ability to use your own shipping accounts with carriers or use Shipstation's negotiated rates. Filters, tags, notes, automations help streamline our shipping and order processing. The interface is user friendly and the rare times I've had an issue and had to contact support, my issues were resolved fairly quickly.

Cons:

Shipstation recently forced all users to the new interface, which I'm not a fan of. But that's more from having used the software for years. With the move, it changed how some things are processed or handled.