I had an overseas customer ask about shipping one of our products to Argentina. Box is 22x22x13, weight 9 pounds. When I price this in Shipstation, I'm given options for USPS Priority Mail International and USPS Express Mail International at around $80-100 price. But if I go to USPS.com and price it, I'm only given Global Express Guaranteed as an option, the price for this is $550. After much digging, I found that there is a limit of 79 inches for girth+length of the package. Even though I entered this into Shipstation's estimator, it did not consider this. Support says that it relies on the carrier's system to enforce that, and that it would do so at the time of shipping. But if I had relied on Shipstation's quote for quoting my client and accepting the job, I would have been in big trouble come time to ship it, because USPS was $550 and Fedex was $650+, both of which are more than the product being sold. I understand the challenge it would present for Shipstation to know all these things, but it puts us at risk relying on what it tells us, so maybe they need to go to the carriers and ask for the estimator API to enforce these things.

Automated Rule for comparing 2 or more shipping options and choosing least expensive.

We ship using FedEx, UPS, and USPS.
It would save us a huge amount of time and money each year if each order would automatically pick the cheapest shipping option between selected carriers.

For example:
1. Order # 1234567 for a "blue widget" gets imported into SS with dimensions 8" X 6" X 4" and weighs 11lbs

2. Automated Rule checks price for FedEx Home Delivery, UPS Ground, and USPS Priority mail Package.

3. FedEx: $12, UPS $12.50, USPS $11.50

4. Order # 1234567 automatically gets assigned to USPS Priority Mail Package since it's cheapest.

This information already exists in SS, but it requires manually changing between each shipping service. This is impractical especially when a business ships thousands of order per month.

Thanks!

We use a dropshipper to fulfill some of the items that we sell. When a multiple orders comes in with part of it being fulfilled within Shipstation and part of it being fulfilled by the dropshipper, and we split the order within Shipstation, whenever the dropshipper ships their portion of the order, Shipstation never becomes aware of the status update, and it remains in our Awaiting Shipment queue and needs to be manually removed. It is burdensome. We use Shipworks as well, and it is able to perform the function of removing a shipment from the shipping queue if another source has updated the Shopify status to fulfilled. We are hoping that Shipstation will be able to perform this service in the future as well. Thanks!

I love Shipstation, but there are still some holes that could make your product more competitive and truly useful.

Dimensional shipping is a problem for many large ecommerce shops, or shops that offer a wide variety of products. As we all know shipping is actually based on volume, not weight. Yet most ecommerce packages can not give a correct ship quote for larger items as they do not quote the volume of the items.

Some shops address this by building the shipping costs into the item they are selling, but this only works well if the customer is buying one item at a time. When we have correct dimensional shipping data and shipping quotes we can offer the customer better shipping rates for a combined order, and this in result will help shop secure the sale.

I strongly suggest that Shipstation allow their customers to get shipping quotes via ShipStation, and allow us to include the product sizes as well as the weights. Shipstation will know all of our box sizes and can figure out the correct final package and give very accurate shipping quotes. There are some other advanced things Shipstation can do once they have this bridge in place.

I will suggest looking at ShipperHQ and what they offer. This is exactly the sort of functionality Shipstation should be offering, but you could do even more since your customers are also doing all of their shipping via your services already. It could be a VERY powerful union of information!

Thank you for your consideration.

Currently, Shipstation does not break out the GST/HST tax that is part of the cost of each label the shipper pays to ship within Canada. This value is returned (or can be requested) via Canada Post's web API. Canadaian businesses need to report the amount of this tax they have paid. All we would need is for SS to request the tax in the API and record it for each label created.If we could export this field in SS reporting, we'd be able to significantly improve automation of our accounting. Note: I am not speaking of the tax collected on the order itself, but rather the tax we pay on the shipping when buying a label).