Apply Bulk Action // Customs Declarations
When we ship internationally, we ship a lot of packages that all have the same items. I wish there was a way that we could make a bulk action that applies the same customs declaration (description, quantity, value, HTS code, Origin) to hundreds of packages at once. Currently, the process where you have to enter 1 at a time is so time-consuming it's insane. Even if there is 1 item in the shipment it takes forever. When there are multiple items, forget it.
Perhaps this could be included in an order import function and mapped, or perhaps it could be a bulk action that is applied. It seems like making this a bulk action feature would be very easy, and would certainly make the largest impact to our team.
Looking forward to your feedback!
DevinH
shared this idea
3 comments
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Kirsten2020
commented
We have this same issue. Hundreds of International orders, each box has 4-5 different customs declarations required based on what's in the box. Currently I spend approximately 3 full days (30 hrs) per batch updating customs info. It is excruciatingly tedious at the best of times.
ShipStation, PLEASE prioritize this. We are currently exploring other software options because this becomes more and more unmanageable as we grow
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DevinH
commented
Thanks for this quick feedback. Here is some more insight into my situation as well as feedback from playing around with your suggestion.
1. This works well when there is a single product in the shipment and we can upload the SKU of the product with the manual import. We really only do manual order imports, so the automatic product matching when importing from another service doesn't apply to our needs.
2. I am not sure how we would do multi-product shipments this way. I have not tried to enter multiple SKUs in the import file, but can test that.
3. It looks like this only works when you import the order with the SKU. I also tried adding in the item and sku after the order was made and it did not sync the product customs data. I tried checking the box to apply to open orders as well and it didn't appear to be working.
4. A lot of the time, our products vary with the cost, HTS code, origin, etc. We do not have a set product that we are selling and shipping, but a dynamic rotating product set. We could always be updating this database as one approach, or go through each order and change the value of the shipment (if the description and hts are the same, but just a different cost) to reflect the correct cost based on that order batch that day. Either way is not ideal for our specific needs.
All in all, I appreciate your suggestion - it will for sure speed up some of our processes, although it is not a complete fix for our exact needs due to the way we use the system with manual order imports, varying customs info across products, etc.
Thanks, team - hopefully, we can get the bulk action on the radar for future improvements. Until then, I will keep playing around with this fix.
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Thanks for your idea, Devin!
While this isn't a bulk option currently (only setting content type and non-delivery options are available as a bulk action for customs), this is a good idea!
In the meantime, you might benefit from using Product Defaults to allow ShipStation to automatically set your customs declarations descriptions, value, HTS code, etc. If you've set ShipStation to create product records from imported orders (this is the default setting, so it's likely you have product records already), you just need to open the Product Details and enter the necessary values in the Customs tab (see image).
Do this for each of your product records and going forward, ShipStation will automatically fill in the customs declarations with these values so you don't have to do it manually.
For more details, review the following help articles...
Product Defaults: https://help.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029962851-Product-Automation-Defaults
ShipStation's International Settings: https://help.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035991611-ShipStation-s-International-Settings
