ShipStation

If you have ever shipped physical products, you know how much work packing and shipping orders can be. When I started Ugmonk, I wasn't sure if I'd sell a few shirts a month let alone hundreds in a day. As with almost everything, we've just figured out things along the way, but finding the right tools can make a big difference. Shipstation has been a lifesaver. For a while we used the shipping feature in PayPal to print USPS postage labels for domestic orders and paid for international postage at the post office. This also involved filling out a customs forms by hand for each international order. Doing this for a handful of orders was tedious, but it worked. As things started to pickup this became very time consuming and just plain annoying. We then tried out Stamps.com which allows you to ship international orders with integrated customs forms all online. While this was a step up from doing them by hand, it was still a pretty painful process. Copying and pasting addresses from Paypal, manually entering each item in the customs menu, and printing the labels one at a time all made for a lot of headaches. On top of that, Stamps.com is super slow and the interface looks like it hasn't been updated in 10 years. We recently switched our shop platform from Big Cartel to Shopify (more on that soon) and one of the main reasons was that we needed better integration with shipping apps to streamline our fulfillment. As Ugmonk has grown we have gone from shipping a few orders to as many as hundreds each week and we needed a better solution to handle this type of volume. Enter Shipstation. We were considering writing our own shipping app but once we discovered Shipstation it was like a dream come true. It had almost every feature we were looking for and integrated perfectly with Shopify. Some of our favorite features include:

• Automation rules so we can assign appropriate shipping settings and flag orders that may need special attention
• The ability to design and print custom packing slips
• The ability to batch process orders for both packing and shipping (including customs forms)
• The option to use multiple postage and shipping providers at no extra cost
• Fast and easy searching
• Splitting and merging orders
• Tight integration with Shopify (including pulling in item weights)

All of these make handling the shipment of tens or hundreds of orders a lot simpler and a lot faster. As with any software there is always room for improvement, but we’ve found ShipStation support to be responsive and we believe they will continue to improve their already stellar offering. We discovered ShipStation as part of our move to Shopify, but we later discovered that ShipStation also integrates with many other ecommerce platforms including Paypal, ebay, Etsy, Amazon, and more. If you sell any quantity of physical goods online you should check them out at www.shipstation.com. (We were not paid to write this review, just happy to spread the word about good products that we use every day. If you do sign up you can use our referral link and give us a little kickback)