ShipStation Review: What is ShipStation? Shipping Made Easy

ShipStation Review: What is ShipStation?

ShipStation review. What is ShipStation? ShipStation is an online shipping software for eCommerce stores. It integrates with major internet players like 3dCart, Amazon, BigCommerce, eBay, Ecwid, Etsy, MailChimp, Printful, Shopify,Square,Weebly,WooCommerce, and more. It’s the leading shipping solution and it automates your shipping process with live-rates from all the major logistics companies like USPS, FedEx, UPS, Royal Mail, Canada Post, and more.

Features

ShipStation has a long list of great features.  With ShipStation, you can ship internationally and receive discounted rates from USPS.  You can integrate with Fulfillment by Amazon; plus, you’ll a USPS and Stamps.com accounts are included.  In addition, you can connect all your sales channels and marketplaces for easy management; ShipStation allows you to manage UPS, FedEx, DHL, and USPS in a single dashboard.

ShipStation has a mobile app to track your shipments.  Furthermore, you can create customized labels with your branding and batch print shipping labels and packing slips to save time. ShipStation has an option to automatically include a return label for every package you’re shipping with an easy one-click return management.  In addition, it comes with reporting tools to track your shipments.

Automation

ShipStation has the ability to automate your shipping process.  It’s a powerful tool for any business looking to use their time effectively.  ShipStation automates shipping area or region based on a set of criteria or rules.  If an order fits the criteria, ShipStation will automatically applies those criteria or rules.  For example, you can set free shipping for any domestic orders or a flat rate for international orders.

In addition, you can process manual orders via the dashboard.  ShipStation provide informational popups throughout the admin dashboard to help walk you through the process.  Furthermore, you can set a default page with their custom views option.  All you have to do is pick what you want to see then set it via the Display options.  I personally like this option because I like to be able to see what I find important to my own business.

Reports

ShipStation has a fairly good reporting tools.  It’s all on display on the Insights page with an option to export reports to PDF or Excel.  The default report is based on days; however, you can change them as you wish.

ShipStation offers plenty of analytical features like default reports, data exports, charts, graphs, hotkey, and barcode scan actions. There’s a massive list of report types to use with ShipStation.  Here are summarized list of the different report fields:

• Product Sales
• Shipped Items
• Shipping Costs
• Order Details
• Postage History
• Inventory (Out of Stock/Low/Audit/Status) Reports
• Sales Trends
• Product Highlights

Positives & Negatives

ShipStation isn’t perfect like everything else in this world.  The best place to find complaints about ShipStation would be on social media platforms like Twitter.  In addition, you can find other complaints if you Google “ShipStation complaints”.

However, the negatives aren’t without positives.  ShipStation does make it easy for an entrepreneur to streamline their shipping process.  We’ve compiled a list of pros and cons around the internet.

Positives

• Real-time shipping rates
• Easy to use admin panel
• ShipStation app lets you track all your packages
• 210+ integrations for added features and scaling your eCommerce store

Negatives

• Unable to identify if a customer is the same individual if they made purchases on different sales channels
• Inability to stabilize software and server up-time causing unforeseen downtime for users
• Tech support provides below average service with generic answers
• Submitting a claim would be tedious and burdensome
• Claims are not always reimbursed

ShipStation Review Integrations

ShipStation has 210+ integrations.  The software practically integrates with every major eCommerce platform, marketplace, email marketing provider, and more.  With so much integrations, ShipStation makes it easy to scale and add features to your business.

In my opinion, I love being able to add features to my businesses.  It’s like building your dream home or playing with Legos minus the annoying part of stepping on them.  All it takes is a simple API.  Here’s a feature list of ShipStation’s integrations:

• 3DCart
• Amazon
• BigCommerce
• DHL
• eBay
• Ecwid
• Etsy
• FedEx
• MailChimp
• PayPal
• Printful
• Shopify
• Square
• Stamps.com
• Stripe
• UPS
• USPS
• Weebly
• WooCommerce
• See the full integrations list here.

ShipStation Review: Conclusion

ShipStation makes it easy for you to manage all your shipments in one place.  There isn’t a need to log into multiple accounts to print shipping labels and manage shipments in different marketplaces or sales channels.  Could you imagine logging into eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and your Shopify store to track all your shipments?  It’ll be time consuming and you’ll probably miss an order.  With ShipStation, it’s easy to see the orders come into a single dashboard.

ShipStation will get some time getting used to the user interface.  However, it’s normal.  The sub-par tech customer service, random downtime, and insurance claims needs to be taken into consideration. As a whole, the perks outweigh the negative when it comes to ShipStation.  It’s an online software and all software have issues. That’s just the problem we face with technology.  When it’s bad, it’s bad; however, when it’s good, we love it.

I have to say ShipStation is definitely worth the effort because of the automation and the single dashboard for multiple sales channels. They make it easy to manage your multiple sales channels.  With ShipStation, you can sell on eBay, Amazon, Etsy and your own Shopify store.  It’ll be a complete waste of time to manage all those market places and your online store orders individually.  ShipStation is a must.