The profitability of a company is adversely affected by – unmonitored shipping costs and inefficient shipping processes. Easy looking solutions like overnight shipping repeated for weeks only lead to bills from the carries that destroy your business margins. To avoid these situations, we recommend “rules-based” shipping automation with ShipStation.

What is ShipStation?

It is a web-based, multi-carrier eCommerce shipping platform designed to streamline the shipment process for eCommerce retailers. ShipStation software helps online sellers fulfill their orders more efficiently by connecting to all their selling channels and carriers in one place. Then, a series of time-saving automation runs to help reduce shipping time. Both the original channel and customer are updated that the order has been shipped.

Features at a glance

ShipStation has a digest interface and that makes it incredibly approachable to everyone, no matter their skill level. Trial accounts are assigned an account manager to help with the bits that you might need help with.

ShipStation provides an enhanced feature set including:

• Custom branding of your shipping labels and packing slips.
• The ability to send return labels with every shipment.
• Marketplace Integrations including eBay and Amazon.
• Additional carrier integrations beyond just UPS, FedEx, and USPS.
• Works with industry-standard eCommerce platforms including Magento, BigCommerce, and Shopify.
• Ability to build “If this, then that” statements to systematically determine how an item should be shipped and with which carrier.
• Import orders from over 100 marketplaces, carts, and stores
• Print labels and rate shop for all carriers.
• A geo-tracking page featuring your brand, social links, and messaging.
• Tracks stock levels and alerts you when your inventory count is low.
• ShipStation helps gain valuable insight into your business and optimize your selling strategy in real-time.

This “rules-based” methodology eliminates the need for your warehouse personnel to make manual and often costly decisions regarding the carrier and service level selection resulting in a faster shipping process and saving money.

ShipStation Tools

• Real-Time rate shopping for carriers beyond UPS, FEDEX and USPS – With the rate calculator, one can easily see all the available rates for each configured carrier and apply these to each order individually, or with automation rules, to a group of shipments, saving a significant amount of time in the shipping department.
• Discounted Shipping Rates – Carriers usually offer negotiated rates to merchants based on their shipping volume. ShipStation allows you to use your discounted shipping rates, or in some cases offer better discounts via their own negotiated rates for customers on their platform. For merchants that do not have a significant volume of shipments, this may provide better pricing.
• Batch Shipping Process – Instead of clicking through every order/shipment to assign shipping service/carrier and package types, and then print a label, with ShipStation, you can combine all shipments into a single batch and use automation rules to process the entire batch quickly.
• International Shipping – This can be an overly complicated process without ShipStation. Use features such as automatic validation of international addresses and create labels and forms all within the ShipStation interface and process these efficiently.
• Tracking – One of the biggest drivers of customer service calls in the eCommerce industry is the tracking of shipments. With real-time updates for shipping and delivery notifications, you can establish custom statuses and update it in Acumatica and then in your eCommerce system. Also, as a merchant, you can see the status of all your shipments in transit in a single place.
• Branding – For any merchant, including their company’s brand on shipping documents adds a lot of value. ShipStation allows you to have high-quality packing slips and labels with the merchant’s branding included.

Why is SHIPSTATION Necessary for you?

• Do you use multiple carriers and perform rate shopping regularly?
• Do you ship internationally?
• Do you sell goods through 3rd party Marketplaces?
• Do you require your company branding on your shipping labels?
• Do you sell goods that have specific rules around the carrier and type of shipment to use? E.g. special delivery options for perishable items?
• Would you like to include return labels with all your shipments?
• Would you like to have detailed and accurate reporting around shipping costs?
• Do you need a good support team that understands every aspect of Shipping and is willing to support your business holistically?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, your company should integrate ShipStation.

Charges

ShipStation feature app is available only with the Multivendor Pro Plan ($45/month). Moreover, you need to enable the Shipping add-on (free) from the ‘feature apps’ section of the app. Access to Shipping requires your Shopify store to be on the plan that supports Real-Time Carrier-Calculated Shipping.

Also, you can enable only one shipping method within ShipStation to calculate the shipping rates.