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, 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. :)
