Scaling growth can be a challenge. When you grow your business across multiple selling channels, organising your different orders and customers can become tedious. That’s why you choose a system like ChannelAdvisor – a single, centralised platform to streamline your e-commerce operations, expand to new channels and grow sales. But what about the shipping and logistical headaches that come along with increased and diversified order volume? While most couriers provide you with a way to print a shipping label from their website, the process is extremely manual and may take you hours of copying and pasting. Finding the right shipping software solution can solve these problems and streamline your fulfilment process so you can focus on growing your business.
What is ShipStation?
Similar to how ChannelAdvisor works as a multichannel solution for organising orders and products, ShipStation allows you to coordinate your shipping and fulfilment strategy from one centralised platform. Whether you manage your orders through ChannelAdvisor or directly through the selling channel, you can import these orders into ShipStation, generate the shipping labels and transmit tracking information and a shipped status back to the order. Then you can email a shipping and tracking confirmation back to the customer. While this is the overview of how a platform like ShipStation works, there is much more that goes into making a shipping software an efficient time-saver.
How does ShipStation help?
A major time-saving component of shipping software is automation. While generating shipping labels and getting packages out the door is a common goal, there are a lot of variables that make your business unique. As such, you can automate many parts of your workflow using ShipStation. Common automations include:
- Applying shipping services and package types to orders
- Assigning orders to order packers
- Using different packing slips or confirmation emails
These are automations that can apply the same to all orders once it enters ShipStation or it can happen based on specific criterias of an order. Things such as:
- Order source
- Requested shipping service
- Items ordered
- Frequent Customer
- Suspicious/fraudulent risk
Automation processes like this reduce the amount of manual entry you have to perform on orders, as well as minimises the risks of error associated with manual entry. Beyond letting you apply these changes to orders, there are additional ways to save time.
Batch Processing
Batch processing, or batch shipping, is another time-saving feature. Instead of printing each individual order, batch processing allows you to group similar orders based on parameters such as same items, same order source, or even something as simple as “these are all of the day’s shipments.” Select the orders and group them into a batch and process. You then use cloud printing apps like ShipStation Connect to print all of your day’s orders automatically.
Multiple Integrations
ShipStation knows a shipping platform is only as valuable as the partners it has, that’s why ShipStation has built a network of partners including the most popular e-commerce platforms and couriers. This way, you don’t have to log into each of these accounts individually, but you can automatically import orders and choose courier rates from one simple interface.
Import orders from:
- ChannelAdvisor
- BigCommerce
- Shopify
- eBay
- Amazon
- Magento
- and more
Connect courier accounts with:
- UPS
- Sendle
- Australia Post
- DHL
- and more
International Shipping
Shipping internationally can be costly, challenging, and time-consuming. Luckily, ShipStation is here to help. Using features like the rate calculator, you can view all available shipping services for an order and choose the one that is most cost-effective or convenient for you. Any customs forms are also available in-app to print out for each shipment and include with your parcels. If you do run into any issues, though, ShipStation’s support team is there to help you get your orders out the door.
Conclusion
Time is money, and ShipStation saves you both. If you’re already using ChannelAdvisor, you know how important it is to manage everything through a central hub. Together, ChannelAdvisor and ShipStation let you grow your business as far as you can imagine and still provide a robust and scalable solution at the centre of your business. If you want to try ShipStation, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial and see how much time and money you could save.
