ShipStation vs. Shopify

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.

Incentivized

Shopify is a great platform for small to medium-sized businesses looking to set up an online store. It's easy to use, offers a wide range of features and integrations, and is perfect for businesses in the retail and food industry. However, large enterprise businesses with complex and custom needs may find Shopify less suitable.

• Integration: It works so well I forget that it is a 3rd party solution sometimes.
• Automation: You can set nested rules based on order details, really cutting down on the little things that slow down your fulfillment process.
• Management: We almost never log into the admin side of BigCommerce thanks to ShipStation. ShipStation handles all of our day-to-day needs.

Incentivized

• It is definitely easy to set up and get going. This does not take a lot of work or effort on the user end, especially if using templates.
• Low code platform. You can. make customizations without code.
• The integrations are diverse and increase functionality.

Incentivized

• 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.

• The main drawback that I am facing in Shopify for a long time is that their sales analytics system is not up to mark. As I am using Shopify to run different stores for my organization it does not get updated after-sales and does not provide the right analytics about the product strength and number of sales.
• Secondly, Shopify has different apps which are best to run the store on max strength but they are very much costly like inventory management, generating multiple discount codes, and more robust customizable editing.

Incentivized

Nothing we have used in the past or have seen thus far even comes close to offering what we get with Shopify Plus, especially for the price. You cannot even come close to getting what we are getting at the price we pay. We are beyond thrilled and Shopify Plus meets and exceeds all of our needs and expectations. We love it!

Incentivized

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)

Incentivized

I think most people are able to suer Shopify that have used a computer. There are some features that take a bit longer to learn. If you are not a creative person it may be a bit more difficult to learn the website customization, but with a help guide or tutorial it will only take a few tries to understand how to work the interface

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

In terms of support I give Shopify a 9 out of 10 because they're always very friendly and thorough, and they personally can't solve my problem for me they always point me in the proper direction with the proper information I need to move forward

Incentivized

Just start now and make the switch, the sooner the better. You will love it and it is really a simple process

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The old platform that I used could not help us to meet our requirements. It was not helping us properly, then I got to know about Shopify and started using it. After 1 month [of] usage of Shopify we could understand that this is the best platform [for E-commerce] to make better sales and goodwill. Shopify helped us to get a proper idea of the analytics of the website. Shopify [supports] most of the [applications] and helps us to make better results.

• It saves a lot of time being able to import the customer data.
• It saves us money by finding us the best rate (e.g. when we offer free shipping on orders).
• It can save data such as your most common box sizes.

Incentivized

• It got the store up quickly so the client could start selling. She was previously selling products on Etsy and Facebook and wanted to consolidate everything onto one website, so the main thing Shopify solved was to reduce the store owner's time in managing all her products on multiple sites. Also, we had previously built a website on Wix with all the custom functionality and branding she needed - a truly great, high-end website - but it performed so slowly that it was unusable. So the speed at which Shopify can be set up and then works on the page is appreciable.
• The website was manageable by the client - she could figure the system out herself after a while so she saved money on costs for hiring developers. She did have to hire developers to customize some of the plug-ins but costs are all relative; it wasn't a high investment compared to building a full e-commerce website. With the complexity and size of her product base and the functionality and branding she wanted to have in a website, and the potential of her business, she would have needed to invest well over $10,000 to get to where she really needs to be. In the end she kept the budget under $5000.00.
• Costs kept climbing with plug-ins having to be added with everything. My client became more involved in building the website and began to try multiple plugins, and she did not have the skill base to evaluate the plugins functionalities so she chose plugins that did not do everything she needed, and then ended up paying the plugin developers to customize the plugins. So on one hand, it's pretty amazing to be able to bring up an e-commerce website as quickly as a week or so, but on the other hand if you need anything customized or deeper functionality in regards to product searching and filtering on the web page, and management on the backend, it quickly goes beyond the skills of the average person to manage, and above their expected budget as well. In the end my client really did not get anything close to the functionality for the website we had originally envisioned.
• Shopify was the easiest way we could find to bring the client's products to a global market. We evaluated several other platforms and the functionality simple did not seem to be adequate, so Shopify seemed like the only solution that could do enough of what we needed and still stay within this client's budget. Really the problem in this project was not platform per se but that the budget wasn't large enough. Shopify managed to provide a solution for an ecommerce store with thousands of products on a tiny budget, so in the sense of pure functionality it provided the best value of all the platforms we evaluated. The solution still isn't big enough for this client's business though so, without having insights into this client's post-build sales results, my guess is that because her new website did not make her products easier to sort through, and she likely didn't have much more budget left to invest in SEO and other marketing of the website, her sales probably didn't increase substantially as a result of having built the website. So I think this project all in all did not likely have a high ROI.

Incentivized