ShipStation
As my dahlia business has grown, I am blessed with orders from across the country, which, of course, need to be shipped. Each of the past three years I have tried a different shipping interface and have finally settled on one: ShipStation. I am so pleased with it, in fact, that I have signed up as an affiliate. So if you click through any of these links I make a little $$ and you get a free trial. Just want to be up-front about that.
I tried three different providers, ShipStation, Shippo, and the Squarespace interface that comes with my website. Pros and Cons of each below:
Squarespace Native Shipping: This would have been the winner, expect for one fatal flaw. Each and every transaction would hit my bank individually and there was no way to set it up otherwise. So not only was my bank statement cluttered with numerous petty transactions, my bank limited me to 50 transactions a day and charge me (a lot) for more than 200 a month. Not happy with that.
What I did like about it is that the tracking label would be automatically recorded to the order and a Your Order Has Been Shipped email would go out. Super easy.
Shippo: Shippo set me up so that I only had to pay when my balance reached $100, so this worked much better for me, fewer transactions per day and per month. What I didn’t care for was the user-interface. It didn’t seem intuitive to me and I spent a lot of time trying to navigate. Considering that my entire shipping season is April and May as I send out the dahlia tuber orders and I am working 12-hour days packing dahlias like a madwoman, this time-sink was not tolerable.
Shippo did integrate nicely with Squarespace, loading the orders automatically so I don’t have to type in addresses. Yay!
ShipStation: ShipStation is the first one I tried and I should have just stuck with it from the get go. Hindsight (sigh). It interfaces beautifully with my Squarespace orders, updated tracking numbers and letting me send Your Order Has Been Shipped emails. Best of all, it lets me Batch the orders. That is, I can get 10 orders ready to go and buy the postage for them in one batch. This makes for a more efficient work-flow (Pack 10, Weigh 10, Print 10, Label 10) and is fits within my bank’s fee structure. In addition, the user-interface is intuitive and super easy to navigate. Best of all, since my shipping season is just two months a year, I can activate my membership for those two months, and then cancel it when the rush is over.
ShipStation also integrates nicely with Squarespace, loading the orders automatically so I don’t have to type in addresses.
If you want to give it a try, click though this ShipStation link and get a free one-month trial. Sweet!
