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 8.0 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 are an e-commerce retailer that needs out of the box functionality to enhance your shipment tracking, then I highly recommend Narvar. The monthly spend far out weighs the cost of having an internal team build this out --- not to mention the time it takes to spin the solution up.
Great when it works. The huge downside when it doesn't if you do not have contingency plans in place. Do not expect timely updates to issues, and you will likely never be able to speak with a human for tech support. A good option for International Shippers in that it streamlines the export documentation when it is working.
The integrations between ShipStation, the marketplaces, and Channel Advisor are perfect and rarely have issues.
ShipStation automatically sends the shipment notification to the marketplace and emails the customer with tracking information which means we never have to worry if our customers are receiving that info.
The tracking portal for custom websites is absolutely great. We've branded it to match our e-commerce store and it provides access for our buyers to real-time tracking updates.
Adding other functionality beyond the basic technology can be costly for a small to medium business. Narvar's grown rapidly since we started using them and their baseline costs for add-ons are out of our price range for post-purchase/returns.
In my opinion, customer support is abysmal. I truly believe support people are trained to just delay, delay, delay as there are multiple times the responses I get back are essentially like the utterly useless tech questions "is your unit plugged in?"
In my experience, there is literally no way to contact anyone at ShipStation outside of their Support Chat/Case System. They have an email for support but it all goes to the same place.
There are just many issues regarding communication of policies and requirements regarding API usage and plan level needs that cause for the low rating. Also, the lack of reporting details that are available through the platform is not ideal for our 3PL needs to track activities of customer's orders and shipping Qty or activities
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.
ShipStation customer support was easy to use. The written help sections were clear and we could find answers to our questions even if we had to dig a little and read several articles. We often used the chat feature to get quick answers. Once the system was set up for our needs it worked quite well.
I haven't seen anything like Narvar exactly. The most similar is the estimated delivery text notification/reference page functionality on Shopify sites.
ShipStation is above and beyond all of its competition. I have tried them all. I also need the ability to ship things, first-class, with just a stamp (no tracking), and Pirate Ship and anything else like Pirate Ship does not have that feature. ShipStation is the only one that does. With ShipStation, I can ship a flat, rigid mailer for 76 cents. With Pirate Ship, the minimum is over $3. When you ship a lot of these, it all adds up.
