As most of you know, ShipStation has been limited to US-based e-retailers since we launched our app a year and a half ago. Well, now you can tell all your Canadian friends about us, because we just released our integration with Canada Post!
If you are one of those companies that want to use our platform, just like you always have been, just keep on truckin’, this integration doesn’t change anything for you. If you’re one of those that can call their company multi-national since you happen to have warehouses in Canada and want to take advantage of shipping via Canada Post: listen up. Because of many, many technical restrictions on this side, you’ll have to sign up for a new ShipStation account—with Canada set as your home country—to be able to use Canada Post. However, you don’t necessarily have to have the same plan as you do with your existing account. Because of the way this works, you could have a Gold account for your US-based shipments and a Bronze account for your Canadian-based shipments. Just remember you will have to sign into each account separately.
Using this new integration, shipments that originate from Canada can be easily sent using our time-saving application to manage orders from over 40 marketplaces and shopping platforms like eBay, Amazon, Magento, and Shopify. You can define automation rules, filters, and profiles to make the copy-and-paste, cut out with scissor procedures you might use today look like the Stone Age of order and shipment processing. All you need to do to sign up with us and see just how amazing your life could be.
Please note that you do have to have a Canada Post account with commercial (contact) rates to attach your account with ShipStation. All you have to do, though, is call them at 1-800-260-7678 to obtain them. From everything we’ve heard over here, it’s a relatively painless and quick process, and you’ll get better rates than if you were to pay via a credit card.
Last week, the Austin Business Journal announced the finalists for their Best Places to Work 2013… and we’re one of them! If you don’t know how it works, here’s the scoop: a survey goes out to all the employees of a company, and they answer questions about the culture, team atmosphere, and benefits. Then, depending on the answers, the company is chosen as a finalist and then based on how many employees that company has, it’s placed into a category.
I can’t tell you how much I personally enjoy working for ShipStation, so it’s no wonder to me that we’re a finalist. With all the fun events that we have in-house, like our weekly lunch meetings (no, really, they are actually fun), in addition to the outside events like The Color Run this past Saturday, this really is a fantastic place to work.
We’re eagerly looking forward to June 6th, where the ABJ will announce the winners. Keep your fingers crossed for us, and if you happen to be in the Austin area, we’re always hiring!
I’m Erika, the social media & content manager for ShipStation. You’ll find me on Twitter, Facebook, our Community Forums and the other areas of the ShipStation world. In my free time, I’m a lover of video games, my cats, and other generally nerdy things. :)
We’ve got a brand new support page that’s been entirely redesigned to help you find your answers more quickly and easily! It has easy access to our support videos, knowledge base, and even our feature request system! We’ve made a quick video to give you a tour of the new site and show off some of its features. Watch the video, and then see the new site for yourself! (Then, don’t forget to come back here and leave us a comment with your feedback!)
Today, we’re super happy to announce that we’ve joined the Magento family as a strategic industry partner. We couldn’t be more pleased about our new relationship with the eBay-owned front-runner, Magento. For those of you who have been around a while, you know that we’ve been integrated with the storefront, but are now proud to officially be a part of their Industry Partner Program.
Magento is a leading e-commerce platform, with solutions available for merchants who want a completely customized solution with their Community, Pro, and Enterprise self-hosted solutions. If you want a store that’s completely specific to you, and you’ve got the development resources, you should definitely look into Magento for your e-commerce platform. For merchants who do not have their own development team, they also offer a web-based / SaaS version of the shopping cart software, called Magento GO, that is just as robust.
This new partnership with Magento & ShipStation is another step forward in our effort to make your life as an online merchant easier than ever and Magento offers a free 30-day trial on their GO platform! For more information on all of their offerings click here.
Today, we’re very much pleased to announce that we’ve strengthened our relationship with Volusion! While we’ve had a Volusion integration for ShipStation for some time now, we’ve been working with the booming e-commerce company, and are delighted to tell you that we are now a certified Volusion Partner!
Volusion is a leading e-commerce software platform, powering thousands of e-commerce sites like 3M, Deloitte, and Nalgene. They’ve got a fantastic and very helpful blog where their “2-minute Tuesday” videos and regular postings help companies great and small succeed in the ecommerce world. They also boast free 24/7 support via phone, e-mail, and live chat. If you’re looking for a new shopping cart platform, and already use ShipStation, give them a look.
We really look forward to working tightly with Volusion to help bring all parties involved (meaning, you, too!) the greatest service and software available. We love helping our customers succeed, and making your lives easier, and we’re excited for the opportunity to do that on a more personal level with Volusion and their merchants.
A few weeks ago, we announced our integration with Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). The integration is a great step forward for retailers who sell on multiple channels to take advantage of having Amazon fulfill your products rather than you having to keep your items in your warehouse/storeroom/etc. The greatest benefit to our integration was that it opened up the process to easily have Amazon fulfill your products that you’re not selling on Amazon.
Now, we’ve opened the gate even wider, and are happy to announce that you can also set up an FBA UK account! What this means is that you can ship your products off to a UK warehouse, and then have Amazon fulfill those orders to many European countries, just like you were a UK seller (meaning, cheaper rates than shipping them from the US to Europe). If shipping prices were a barrier to you selling your products overseas, this new integration can certainly help with that.
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| Send your products to Amazon.co.uk | Amazon stores your products | European customer orders your products from any of your online sales channels | You get the order in ShipStation, and we tell Amazon to fulfill it | Amazon fulfills the order | Amazon ships it to your customers in Europe |
*Images courtesy of Amazon UK
Basically, you ship your products to Amazon’s UK fulfillment centers, and pay the appropriate fees. List your items on your chosen platform (eBay, Buy.com, Shopify, etc.), and when they sell to certain countries in Europe, you can fulfill them via Amazon. Using ShipStation, you can even automate this process using Automation Rules & product tags. (We’ve got detailed instructions at the bottom of the article here.)
As with signing up for Amazon’s US FBA service, there are some things you’ll need to do to sign up for FBA UK. Amazon.co.uk has a fantastic resource here, and you can delve a bit deeper by going into the FAQs or by getting in contact with them. You might also want to talk to a tax professional to make sure that you’re covered with the different tax laws that shipping overseas entails. If you’ve already been selling on Amazon, or on Amazon.co.uk, it’ll probably be a bit of an easier process, but if you’re not, it’s definitely worth looking into.
You’ll first need to make sure that you have your FBA UK account set up in your ShipStation account. You’ll also need to have the products in ShipStation that you plan to fulfill via FBA UK.
Happy Shipping!
I’m Erika, the social media & content manager for ShipStation. You’ll find me on Twitter, Facebook, our Community Forums and the other areas of the ShipStation world. In my free time, I’m a lover of video games, my cats, and other generally nerdy things. :)
Express 1, a provider of discounted USPS shipping postage, has expanded their services to include even more ways to save money on shipping via USPS.
USPS is, in many cases, the cheapest way to ship your goods from your warehouse or storeroom (perhaps your garage) to your buyer, whether they’re domestic or overseas. You probably started out doing the “I’ll pack these at home and then go to the post office and stand in line to purchase my labels and get my packages on their way.” The flat rate packages were an awesome addition to the postal lineup when they were added, but like so many others, you soon got tired of standing in line day after day. So, you found ShipStation, and started doing things online. Oh, how nice it is to not have to go through that long and laborious process anymore.
Maybe that was your progression in shipping out your own products as you grew. Maybe not. The fact of the matter is, you ship via USPS. And with ShipStation, you don’t have to do all that standing in line and waiting. You get your rates, and print your labels using your own printer.
For those of you who signed up for, and began taking advantage of ShipStation’s free Express 1 account, you saw how awesome their rates were. Well, we’re very pleased to let you—and all of our sellers—know that Express 1 has expanded their offering to include discounted USPS rates on even more products. You can now get deep discounts on all your domestic flat rate priority packages (small, medium, or large boxes, envelope, padded envelope, it doesn’t matter), and awesome Priority and Express Mail rates on anything else, 1 – 70 lbs! If you shipped with Express 1 previously, you know that Express 1’s discounts only extended to a couple of flat rate box types, and only a few of the lower weights, so you know what a huge opportunity this is!
If you ship via Express Mail, you get discounts on those, too. Anything in a flat rate box gets discounted, and if it’s in your own packaging, you get discounts on anything from a half-pound to 10 lbs. If you’re wondering, yes, this has also been expanded (weight limit upped from 2-10 lbs. & expansion in package types), and signifies another way for you to save some cash when shipping your orders out.
But what about international? Those discounted rates are still in place, just like they always were. Which means you have a very well-rounded offering, and tons of options for shipping your orders cheaply when choosing to ship via USPS with Express 1, through ShipStation. Want some details? Here’s a full table of their new, expanded offerings:
| Priority Mail | Express Mail | |
| All USPS Flat Rate Products: Commercial Plus Pricing |
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| Your Packaging*: Commercial Plus Pricing |
1 – 5 lbs (previously 1 – 3 lbs) |
0.5 – 10 lbs (previously 0.5 – 2 lbs) |
| Your Packaging*: Less than Commercial Base Pricing |
6-70 lbs | |
| Your Packaging*: 20% Less than Retail |
11-70 lbs | |
| Other Services: Less than Commercial Base Pricing |
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| International: Less than Commercial Base Pricing |
Your Packaging* 0 – 70 lbs |
Your Packaging* 0 – 10 lbs |
* You may use either your own packaging or USPS’s free shipping boxes
At the end of the day, the new expanded product offerings from Express 1 are awesome. Now that you’ve done yourself that huge favor by using ShipStation to avoid those long post office lines and streamline your entire shipping and fulfillment process, do yourself another favor and check out Express 1. Trust me, it’s something you won’t regret.
I’m Erika, the social media & content manager for ShipStation. You’ll find me on Twitter, Facebook, our Community Forums and the other areas of the ShipStation world. In my free time, I’m a lover of video games, my cats, and other generally nerdy things. :)
Right on the heels of a very exciting opportunity, we have another new integration to announce. We have just partnered up with Storenvy to offer all existing 28000+ stores (and all future stores) the ability to fulfill and ship all their orders quickly and efficiently!
For those of you less aware of what awesomeness Storenvy has to offer, here’s the gist: Storenvy offers both a marketplace and a storefront to their customers. As a shopper, you can go search for “Jewelry” and you’ll consequently get bombarded with a gajillion (yes, I actually used that word) results of fantastic, and creative jewelry of all shapes, sizes, and styles. They’re mainly creative based, so it’s not a place you’d go to necessarily find auto parts or something. However, if you’re looking for new cuff links or a dress to wear out on the town, you’ll have plenty of options from which to choose.
The actual integration between Storenvy and ShipStation is really easy to implement, too. (We go over the whole kit and caboodle in our help article here.) Once you do that, your orders get imported automatically, and then you’ll be able to quickly fulfill and ship your orders all while taking advantage of the free Express 1 and DYMO Endicia USPS accounts that come with your subscription.
Interested in learning a bit more about how ShipStation can help you with your existing Storenvy store? Check out our full features list and then watch some of our tutorial videos to see the app in motion.
If you’re not already a Storenvy user, you can check out their offerings (and how you can get a free storefront) here.
I’m Erika, the social media & content manager for ShipStation. You’ll find me on Twitter, Facebook, and the other areas of the ShipStation world. In my free time, I’m a lover of video games, my cats, and other generally nerdy things. :)
Today, you may have seen an article on TechCrunch about a brand-new feature for ShipStation. Hidden amongst the talk about AWS and the cloud, you may have noticed something else: we now offer Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). For any of you who fulfill your orders through Amazon, just think of what you could accomplish by using your ShipStation account to fulfill those orders over the process that you have now. Yeah, that’s a lot of time you’d save.
Here’s how FBA works to those of you unfamiliar with it: you have your store on eBay, Shopify, Volusion, Sears, etc. and you get an order. Rather than ship that item yourself, you pay Amazon to keep it in its warehouse for you and use its fulfillment and shipping providers to do everything past the “Yay, I got an order” part. So, once you have your celebration over receiving an order, you let Amazon know to fulfill and ship the order, and they take care of that entire process. Once the order has shipped, Amazon will send you the tracking number and shipment status. You then communicate that information to both your marketplace and customer through a type of copy-and-paste routine. That’s where we come in.
If you’d like your orders fulfilled through Amazon’s FBA service, rather than ship them yourself through ShipStation, you need only move the slider from “Shipment” to “Fulfillment” when you have an order (or orders) selected within the main Orders screen. Then, select “FBA” as the provider, choose the preferred Service, and ship the item! Once shipped, Amazon will immediately notify ShipStation of the tracking number and shipment status where we then instantly and automatically update your marketplace and customer with that information, just as if you had shipped the item yourself, but without the manual steps.
FBA is a fantastic way to easily fulfill and process orders from any marketplace, and now we’ve helped to make the process even easier, especially for those of you who still do some fulfillment in-house. Fulfillment can easily take up most of your time when running an online eCommerce business, and we’re sure that if you’re not already using ShipStation, we can help you cut down on your order processing time. If you decide to also go with FBA for part (or all) of your order fulfillment, our app will help you streamline that process as well, and help you save valuable time.
To sign up for FBA within ShipStation, all you need to do is go to your Settings page, and click the newly renamed Shipping / Fulfillment Providers link. (Previously, it was Postage / Shipping Providers.) Here, simply click on the Fulfilled by Amazon fulfillment provider and follow the on-screen instructions. If you’re looking to help manage your inventory, our friends over at Stitch Labs can help with their recently-announced integration with Amazon and Amazon’s FBA program.
Looking for a bit more info on FBA before you sign up? No worries; Amazon has a few fantastic videos and FAQs for more information.
I’m Erika, the social media & content manager for ShipStation. You’ll find me on Twitter, Facebook, and the other areas of the ShipStation world. In my free time, I’m a lover of video games, my cats, and other generally nerdy things. :)
So this has been a crazy year. And we mean that in the best way possible. We’ve moved twice, grown our staff by 400%, added tons of features, and we’re now integrated with over 30 marketplaces and shopping carts. While everybody knows that number now, our oldbies know how many we started with.
Don’t worry, we’ve still got stuff up our sleeves, and we’ve got plenty of things working here behind the scenes, so you can expect 2013 to start off with a bang. And once we get started, we’re not slowing down.
One more thing… We’ve added DHL Global Mail support! Now, you can take advantage of DHL’s consolidation services when you’re shipping your orders through ShipStation. The handiest thing about it all is that it’s all handled directly through Endicia, so when you get your account all set up, there’s no extra account you have to worry about funding. Interested? Fill out our form to get started!
Thanks for being with us on this crazy ride of 2012. We can’t wait to see what 2013 brings!
I’m Erika, the social media & content manager for ShipStation. You’ll find me on Twitter, Facebook, and the other areas of the ShipStation world (especially the forums). In my free time, I’m a lover of video games, my cats, and other generally nerdy things. :)
