ShipStation Reviews

Pros

It is by far the best e-Commerce tool for shipping and logistics. It helped me grow and run my business immensely. I was able to easily plug in the stores that I operate and it worked like a charm. It populated all the orders without any problem. I also liked the shipping discounts that it provided, as well.

Cons

I found it a little clunky to use at first. I had trouble navigating the orders. It is really a warehouse type of tool which I had to get used to. I had to learn to how to navigate using the software which didn't seem as intuitive as shipping on eBay or Etsy, for example.

Alternatives Considered

BigCommerce

Reasons for Choosing ShipStation

Stamps.com is also a mandatory subscription to utilize USPS postage. So technically I am still using it but I use it through ShipStation. Previously, I was just using Stamps.com by itself but was unable to connect accounts and get the amazing discounts that ShipStation provides me now.

Switched From

Stamps.com

Reasons for Switching to ShipStation

BigCommerce SUCKS. I used BigCommerce and set up an entire store only to find out that it is the worst service. It was terrible and I am so happy I made the switch to ShipStation from BigCommerce. BigCommerce is expensive and locked me into a platform that I didn't want to use. I had to completely redesign everything and wasn't able to use the shipping platform because it was just hard to navigate and poorly designed.

Pros

It is super easy to implement, it has a lot of features to make your job faster and it has good customer support if you have a bit of patience.

Cons

I don't like that I can not put insurance into auto re charge for more than $100.00

Alternatives Considered

ShippingEasy

Reasons for Choosing ShipStation

Because Shipstation offered better rates and I like their UI more.

Switched From

ShippingEasy

Reasons for Switching to ShipStation

Because Shipstation offered better rates and I like their UI more.

Pros

It was easy to use n it had lots of great features easy made labels, tracking, inventory management , choice of couriers, prices were good when quoted to u, do e-commerce , distribution & more was great n the beginning

Cons

They would overcharge me all the time if the package was half a pound over weight instead of just having 2 pay a lil extra it's like they would void what u paid already & make u pay a what itd cost 2 shipped like u hadn't paid, & 1 time I paid 6$ to ship 1 piece of wall decal that was barely heavier than a reg piece of paper & they said it weighted 7 pounds yet it didn't even weigh 1 pound they charged me like 12$ on top of the $6 id paid ahead of time 4 basically a 8×10 piece of paper. After being over charged 15 times I never used them again

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.

Alternatives Considered

ShippingEasy

Reasons for Switching to ShipStation

Was recommended to me by UPS

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.

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.

Alternatives Considered

ShippingEasy, ShipWorks, Easyship and Shippo

Reasons for Switching to ShipStation

I was refered to it as a reliable tool to get shipping done. Unlimited shipping channels can be added.

Pros

Integration is a cinch. YOu really need next to no technical knowledge to set this up on most platforms. Once you create all the rules anyone and I mean anyone can just come in and fulfill all your orders.

Cons

Honestly, I would say that I wish it was free but it is as I like to say WEP - Worth Every Penny, and it doesn't really cost very much.

Pros

What I like most is the ability to print directly onto adhesive labels. It sounds like a small thing, but having to print out labels on a paper, and then cut/fold them, and then place into a label sleeve takes a lot of time and effort when packaging a large number of orders. ShipStation allows me to print and stick in one easy step.

Cons

What I like least is because it is not affiliated with an official carrier service (FedEx, USPS, etc) I have to actually go and drop off the packages. A carrier will not come to my business to pick it up.

Pros

It's easy to use and makes my job convenient. I'm glad I discovered Shipstation.

Cons

I have no complaints about it. It helps us on the daily!

Alternatives Considered

Stamps.com

Reasons for Choosing ShipStation

Just easier to navigate and gets it done in a jiffy.

Reasons for Switching to ShipStation

It was just easier and more user-friendly. That matters for a company, especially when you have older employees who aren't as "high-tech".

Pros

Easy to use and ability to price shop all carriers on one dashboard

Cons

Cannot be used as an inventory management system.

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.

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.

Pros

The price checking, the tracking, the integration the ease of use...all lead to an excellent product.

Cons

So far we have not run into anything major but we have just implemented and are still in testing phase so we need more time for a list of potential cons to emerge (if any do)

Alternatives Considered

Shippo

Reasons for Choosing ShipStation

Price Shopping made easy.

Switched From

FedEx Ship Manager

Reasons for Switching to ShipStation

The array of features, the pricing and the seemingly straight forward integrations were the main factors.

Pros

1) Import orders from multiple ecommerce platform
2) One software for multiple shipping carriers and method
3) Great email notification for clients, multiple options of emails and multiple templets
4)inventory tracking
many other good futures

Cons

1) Depend on package you have with ship station support can take long time to answer your question. No phone support for any users and only email support for lowest package. This is not acceptable. When I need to ship and I have issue I need to call somebody and fix problem ASAP. If you send email you can wait who know how long to resolve issue. Live chat is available only for selected ship station clients ( base on how much you are paying = selected package of ship station) and it may take very long time to actually chat with somebody ( we are talking hours in some cases before you are at top of chat queue )
2) you have to press button to read package weight if you have scale attached. This is very annoying if you ever used software with automatic scale. You place package on scale and software already know what you shipping. ( or alarm you when scale is 0 = nothing on scale ). I had packages returned because I did not press "read" scale button and package was over weight compared to postage purchased. Same goes the other way. You pay more for postage if your package is less than what you estimate in your ecommerce platform.
3) FedEx international shipping has big problem. Ship station does not print commercial invoice for international packages. You technically can print label but than you have to go to FedEx and fill out commercial invoice form. I do not understand why it can not be printed at the same time with label. All info is already available ( item, price etc) on ship station after importing order. Ship Station print all required paper work for USPS international packages
4) address verification is not strong future on a software . I am comparing it to a stamps.com again. If client place wrong address on a form ship station will tell you that address is not valid but will not tell you what is wrong and will not suggest correction. Stamps.com will suggest correct zip code , street name , apartment number if it is missing etc. Ship station will only tell you " invalid apartment number" or "apartment not found"
5) international imported addresses create issue sometimes if client used other than English address form. German , Japanese, Spanish language use soft punctuations and different letters like ~ or ę ó ś ć and many similar. Ship station when import such address create strange characters replacing original with something like @##@$%% and if you print it I can guaranty package will not be delivered to a clients since local post office will not recognize street name or town.
6) some countries are not recognized by ship station as international address. Republic of Ireland is not recognized. If client place that name on order form Ship station assign USA address to it. Since this is official name if country my client always put it than way and not Ireland in Country section. They would have to put Ireland instead ( Ireland in country field create correct international destination) Same goes to United Kingdom but England will be correct ( it may be few others - just do not remember )

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pros

I like how ShipStation swiftly and efficiently manages the order inventory. With ShipStation, it helps the company to coordinate with multiple carriers and order sources in one place. It has an excellent integration with the main shipping service to accelerate shipping management activities.

Cons

Sometimes, ShipStation may fail to print the labels the user wants but this can be manually downloaded and printed from outside ShipStation. Despite this, there is still a lot in there to explore since the user interface is good.

Pros

I like the ease of syncing our orders with shopify, shipping them through shipstation, and having the tracking number then re-uploaded to shopify.

Cons

I had an issue a long time ago of not being able to change SKU or UPC numbers in my inventory. It has been a year and customer service never figured it out or replied to my most recent messages. We were able to edit the packing slips on our old plan, then they changed it so you had to be upgraded further to access that ability. We have an error on our old packing slip and am not able to get it fixed unless I pay an additional $100 for one month.

Pros

Shipstation connects with some important channels that it's parent Stamps.com does not.

Cons

price is expensive compared to Stamps.com it's parent company.

Pros

It works, most of the time. There isn't actually any alternative.

Cons

You have to refresh to page every single time you use it, or else it doesn't work.

Pros

Believe it or not, it's the little things that I enjoy about ShipStation. One of my favorites is the "Tags" feature. Being able to color coordinate particular orders is great! Aside from placing orders "On Hold", certain orders have to be identified and tagged. By tagging them, this allows us to avoid errors. Again, it's the little things that make a difference.

Cons

Shipstation's "Rate Calculator" could be better. Every time I utilize this feature, it gives me inaccurate rates. I mainly utilize this feature to give accounts quoted rates but after a handful of them turned out to be incorrect, I've had to go around it.