Rithum is a commerce network that helps brands, suppliers, and retailers work together to deliver connected e-commerce experiences. The Rithum platform helps brands and retailers accelerate growth, optimize channel operations, and scale product offerings.
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ShipStation
Score 8.1 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…
Excellent for marketplace sellers with a lot of products - or those with a high turnover of SKUs. Not well suited to the small seller with only a few SKUs to promote. Also probably not suited to someone who only cares about a single marketplace. The real strength of it comes from managing multiple marketplaces through a single system.
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.
Complex, Yet Simple Navigational Interface: ChannelAdvisor is a beast, but navigating through their platform is relatively straightforward. The overall heirarchy is very well put together.
One Feed to Rule Them All: With ChannelAdvisor, all we have to do is connect our inventory to their system once. Instead of having to construct and connect dozens of different product feeds to our internal inventory system, we simply connect to ChannelAdvisor and use the same single feed to build out all others' website templates.
Product Mapping Made Easy: Mapping product attribute data across a multitude of unique online marketplaces and digital marketing sites can seem like a daunting task. ChannelAdvisor does a great job of simplifying this process, providing easy-to-understand and manage feed templates containing helpful descriptions and categorization.
Business Rules and Lookup Lists: I use these all the time when "transforming" our raw inventory data to the specifications of any given feed. They are extremely helpful and super easy to build.
Efficient Product Optimization: Instead of having to deal with the time-consuming task of making minute changes to thousands and thousands of skus, ChannelAdvisor allows you to automate these changes in a matter of minutes. It's much more scalable for our business.
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.
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.
Without ChannelAdvisor, our business wouldn't be where it is today so the idea of NOT renewing is out of the question. By not renewing we would have to hire more employees and have more of a workload for existing employees. By keeping costs low and employees effecient we have been able to grow exponentially.
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
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.
Last year we looked into GoDataFeed as a result of some frustration with ChannelAdvisor's support team (plus we wanted to find some cheaper options). As much as I was looking for a reason to go with someone else, ChannelAdvisor simply holds too much of an edge when it comes to optimization and reporting features. In the end, the sophisticated, yet simple nature of ChannelAdvisor's platform outweighed less-than-ideal customer service. It also may have been the fact that we were already entirely set up and familiar with the ChannelAdvisor interface. Starting over just didn't make sense, and we really didn't have a reason to complain other than cost (which isn't terrible given our sales performance) and customer support
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.
Since my client has used ChannelAdvisor from the beginning, he has been satisfied with his ROI. The fees ChannelAdvisor costs him are quite confusing because it is a monthly fee, plus a percentage of each transaction, plus the fees from Amazon, Ebay, etc. and then he has the cost of the product and the cost of shipping. My client struggled to understand bottom line ROI but that is not the fault of ChannelAdvisor. I was shocked to see the kind of revenue he was able to generate but it appeared to me to be high volumes of transaction and lots of work and fees for very little ROI.
