ShipStation Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Ease of use and feature richness. We had tried a couple of other shipping systems for our online shop, and none were as intuitive and user friendly as Shipstation. We were able to get up and running very quickly when we first started, and now, many years later, I've learned much of the the deep functionality that lays beneath the simple surface.

Cons
I had to think a while, but I do with the dashboard reporting was a bit clearer and easier to read. There are a couple of widgets on there that I have still to figure out quite how to read.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Shipstation is great for companies that are looking for a label printing solution for there shopping carts. Shipstation is able to handle high volumes of orders and allows for labels to be pre-printed, which can greatly increase the fulfillment time. There are pretty good filtering options that can lead to more efficiencies when printing that can save time with your fulfillment team. Shipstation integrates with many different platforms fairly seamlessly, which allows for more diversity in the ever growing number of platforms that are out there. They are also constantly adding new platforms that can integrated with. I think the fact that this software is user friendly and efficient in its design makes this software a worthwhile investment for those that need a better shipping solution.

Cons
The issues that we have run into with this software as we have scaled to processing over 3000 shipments a day are too many holes which can cause many opportunities for errors, processing speeds, and lack of flexibility. When you are processing up to 3000 orders a day problems flesh themselves out quickly. One issue that has arisen is the inability to hold people accountable when errors occur. For example, since the labels are pre-printed there is not a simple to way to know who misshiped an order when it is sent incorrectly to a customer. On top of that, since the labels are pre-print there is no way to verify through software on the outbound that a shipment is correct. You have to trust that your team is packing order correctly, which is guaranteed to cause problems regardless. There is also the possibility that labels can be double printed or not printed at all since labels are processed and then a PDF is created to print orders. This has been costly for us an multiple occasions, which is hardly preventable no matter who you have printing. Due to the fact that Shipstation is cloud based this can cause issues with processing speeds. We have seen hang ups (especially on Mondays) that cause the whole team to be slowed down due. The other issue with cloud based system is the lack of flexibility for Shipstation to be customized to how you would like it. If changes are made they have to be made globally, which can take a while or just simply cannot happen altogether.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
We have two small retail stores with most of our owners and employees' time dedicated to servicing those in-store customers and providing great experiences for everyone who walks through the door. Shipstation allowed us to open up our online store and divert minimal time to fulfilling the rush of orders we received from our website. During the Covid 19 Pandemic this website with the Shipstation software helped us to keep the doors open.

Cons
Integration with our Point of Sale Solution is not perfect and could be improved significantly.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10