Narvar, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their post-purchase oriented customer experience platform, providing shipment tracking, customer pick up options, notifications, and purchase return capabilities and features.
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ShipStation
Score 7.1 out of 10
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ShipStation is an order fulfillment and inventory management web-based shipping software designed for eCommerce businesses. It allows users to import, manage, and ship orders from multiple online selling channels while providing discounted rates and integrations with carriers like USPS, UPS, DHL Express, Canada Post, FedEx, Royal Mail, AUSPost, and more. ShipStation also offers workflow automation to speed up fulfillment, and branded package tracking, vital for enterprise and small businesses…
If you're not on a platform that has a branded post-purchase landing page or in-email estimated delivery date script, Narvar provides this experience. It's a nice-to-have for any brand that wants to provide a seamless, branded shopping experience for their customers. Narvar's grown rapidly and it seems they are increasing costs, which may be prohibitive and hard to justify for smaller companies.
I do - and have - recommended them to other businesses. If they had taken care of the USPS pickup option and started supporting Rollo printers again I would have given them a 10. But a year with no resolution is unacceptable. Everything else about them is excellent. When I do have issues I'm usually able to contact someone via live chat and get it resolved. They are glitchy on occasion, but what piece of modern technology isn't.
Narvar offered us a turn-key solution that we had up and running in less than a month.
Narvar offered several out of the box widgets (solutions) to help build/customize content (calendar view, milestone icons, SMS messaging and personalize content based on items purchased).
Narvar's solution is scalable/expandable to include returns (once we are ready).
For years users have requested UPS End of Day Report for Driver to Scan. Shipstation Refuses to offer this and it means that Claims with the carrier are next to impossible to process as there is no PROOF the carrier received your package.
Customer Service is Seriously Lacking within the last 6-12 months. Repeated outages, problems, and their front-tier support has no insight as to how long the system will be down. Poor Response times for even the most basic of issues such as error logs so our cart can troubleshoot from their end.
The Status Page is inaccurate. 5 of the last 6 times when we had major issues their status page shows as 100%. Not a reliable gauge of up-time.
If you take some time to learn what all the options and features of ShipStation do, it will save you time, energy and headaches as the system works for domestic orders and international orders for export. You have the ability to adjust info that auto populates into the customs forms for exporting goods and ShipStation solidly integrates with BigCommerce (outside of my previously disclosed web browser issue which could be the browser's fault)
Once it's set up, it doesn't require much support. We used to have quarterly or bi-annual touch bases with an account person to review our rating and customer usage but haven't heard from them in a while - either because we're too small or they got rid of this interaction. Can't say we miss it though because we can see our rating and feedback, and there is only so much you can do within the confines of the platform without adding on new functionality.
I have quarterly calls with my account rep to discuss metrics and performance to ensure we are remaining consistent without fulfillment and transit times. He is super friendly and knowledgable. Whenever I have questions, if he can't answer them himself, he gets me in contact with the appropriate person almost immediately.
At the time, Narvar had no other competitors to my knowledge. We looked at building this functionality in house which had a 3 month estimate. Everyone involved happily welcomed the tool.
We select ShipStation for our store and for clients' stores as an easy way to get accurate shipping rates for national orders. ShipStation is easy to integrate into the Shopify and Big Commerce store platforms, free app, 1 click install, easy set-up and clients like the easy to use interface to do their shipping for accuracy.
