What to Look for in a Warehouse Shipping Software
The modern internet shopper expects speed, convenience, and personalization. In order to stay competitive amidst current trends, businesses must value every minute between order placement and package arrival. Customers continue to value customized experiences and are willing to put their money on the line to receive them.
A buyer’s experience with a brand doesn’t end on the checkout page—touchpoints continue throughout email confirmations and shipping updates through to exploring a package’s contents including invoices and packing slips. All of these stages are an opportunity to impact the customer experience and leave a lasting impression, creating loyal customers and brand advocates that will be the lifeblood of a business’s continued scalability.
At ShipWorks, we have developed warehouse shipping software that puts our 20 years of expertise forward and our money where our mouth is. Not only do we offer services that save you and your customers time and money, we stand behind our commitment to creating custom experiences and providing white-glove customer service that excels at helping you generate deeper success. With ShipWorks, you can expect speed, flexibility, unprecedented performance, benefits to cost-management, and world-renowned security with uptime you can rely on.
Best of all, the transition to ShipWorks warehouse and shipping software couldn’t be faster or easier, with limitless integrations and seamless adaptation to your precise workflow, even if you have a pre-existing warehouse shipping platform. We know you’re busy, that’s why we focused on making the switch to our software as simple and speedy as possible, so there’s no downtime and no hassle for you—just sit back and enjoy the fruits of making a great decision. You can even try ShipWorks free for 30 days.
How To Pick The Best Shipping Software For Your Warehouse
We’ll say it again—no two shipping warehouses are the same. It’s important to understand your unique requirements and struggles in order to determine the right shipping software solution for your business. Here, we’ll go into greater depth about what factors you should pay close attention to when choosing a new warehouse shipping software.
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What to Look for in Your New Warehouse Shipping Software
While warehouse shipping software comes in all shapes and sizes (and price ranges), some with minimalist features and sleek user interfaces and others with all the bells and whistles and more menus than you can count on your fingers and toes combined, there are a few factors that set most warehouse shipping software solutions apart.
Ease of Integration With Current Systems
If you’re just starting out with warehouse shipping software, then you might not need to worry as much about integrations from the outset. However, if you already have well-defined workflows or a slew of pre-existing integrations, it’s important to know how difficult or time-consuming it would be to change to a new platform. This task can grow increasingly complex if you have to integrate multiple pre-existing systems.
With ShipWorks, switching is easy. We offer near-limitless integrations using ODBC data source integration. We integrate with Amazon, eBay, Shopify, BigCommerce, Etsy, WooCommerce, PayPal, and many, many more.
Warehouse Shipping Software Cost
Some enterprise-grading warehouse shipping software solutions cost more than most businesses make in a month. It’s important to understand not only what features you need, but what your budget looks like so that you’re still making a profit with your newly-bolstered efficiency.
ShipWorks has plans that scale with your business’s needs, starting at only $49/mo all the way up to our Warehouse Elite plan that supports 50k shipments / mo from multiple shipping locations.
Warehouse Shipping Software Time to Implementation
If your time is money (and it is—it’s the only currency you only spend once), then you need to consider how long it will take to implement an entirely new warehouse shipping software system, and how much risk or profit-loss is feasible for your business to manage.
Luckily, ShipWorks makes implementation speedy and simple, so you don’t have to suffer with a changeover that drags on and on, so you can get back to business, better than ever before.
Shipping Software Capabilities
What features do you really need? If you’re only shipping ten packages a month, do you really need an expensive plan that can handle 50,000? If you don’t need it now, will you? You don’t want to have to switch software in the middle of a big business boom, slowing you down and losing your competitive edge. Scalability is a good capability to have for any business.
Additionally, consider what your needs are (and what you expect them to be), for things like data collection and real-time analysis, visibility, customization, up-time, automations, and anything else your business finds non-negotiable.
ShipWork’s offers a feature-rich warehouse shipping software platform that scales with your business, boasting robust, enterprise-grade features, enhanced automations, and cutting edge AI and BI tools to support your business’s technological transformation.
Ongoing Maintenance & Support For The Shipping Warehouse Software
You want to choose shipping warehouse software that supports your future. Seek out platforms that stay up-to-date with ongoing maintenance to help ensure both uptime and security of your data and that of your customers.
ShipWorks guarantees 99.99% uptime and already has 20 years of product evolution behind us. We are here to stay, and we will keep growing and evolving alongside you. Plus, we offer complimentary white-glove support so you’ll always have the team you need to get your where you’re headed—we’ve got your back via call, email, and forums for your convenience.
Who Might Need Software Built For a Shipping Warehouse?
The users of shipping warehouse software vary a lot as it pertains to their needs. Important considerations include:
- Size of warehouse or ecommerce business: the more you scale, the more impact warehouse automations and similar features will have on your business. Similarly, the size of your team, the number of decision makers, the literal, physical size of your location, and the amount of data you have to keep track of are all important factors to consider when choosing the type of shipping warehouse software that is best suited to your business.
- Typical output volume: Are you making 5, 500, or 50,000 shipments per month? The amount of output you need to support is crucial in determining the best shipping warehouse software. For example, ShipWorks can princt 16,000 labels per hour, but that isn’t relevant to a business that only needs to store or ship a few dozen packages each month.
- Number of warehouse locations: Some shipping software only supports one location, while others offer plans to support more than that. Understanding how many warehouses you intend to ship from—both now and in the future—should influence your decision of which software to use. With ShipWorks, we can scale to fit any business needs, from your first few hundred orders from a single location to tens of thousands or more from multiple places, all backed by our same enterprise-grade suite of features.
- Shipping contents: Some businesses have special shipping considerations such as refrigerated or otherwise perishable items, living items, toxic or dangerous items, or anything that is otherwise regulated. It is important to determine whether or not your warehouse shipping software can meet your needs and maintain compliance throughout the process if your shipping contents come with special precations.
- Shipping weights: Are you shipping goods that are particularly large or bulky? Costs can scale quickly if the incorrect (or less efficient) carriers are chosen or, worse yet, if a carrier that can’t support your item size or weight is chosen. With ShipWorks cost-comparing automations, you can save on bulky shipments thanks to real-time analysis.
Capabilities of ShipWorks’ Shipping Software
ShipWorks offers multi-carrier support for all of your shipping needs alongside deep customization to suit your warehouse shipping workflow with automatic best-rate and best-carrier decision making, real-time data analysis for enhanced visibility, and white-glove support. With enhanced, modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, we’re here to usher in the new age of shipping and to support you and your business on your journey to technological transformation.
Real-Time Data Analysis and Visibility of Warehouse Shipping
Complete visibility, accuracy, and up-to-the-minute information can make the difference between old warehouse inventory that gathers dust in a shipping warehouse and a successful, growing business that exceeds customer expectations.
With ShipWorks, all shipping and customer information flow into a single warehouse shipping platform, giving enterprise ecommerce shippers unprecedented control and visibility. Easily see an overview of warehouse operations or access detailed, granular reports that empower management and key decision-makers to optimize in ways they never thought possible. All-inclusive warehouse shipping software should natively include key features that are important to warehouse management like profit/loss reporting, auditing, and volume reports.
Allows Customization Based on Your Warehouse Shipping Workflow
No two businesses are alike, and warehouses are no different. Enterprise shipping software that adapts and conforms to the way your business operates (instead of vice versa) is crucial to success that scales without a hitch. The ability to customize the shipping workflow and tailor it to the unique needs of each business is a competitive advantage in today’s modern, lean, and agile work environments that require constant improvement and the ability to adapt and pivot on the fly.
For customization that reaches the consumer to create those Insta-worthy customer experiences and loyal fans, ShipWorks shipping software offers customized templates for invoices, packing slips, email notifications, and other basic shipping communication. No more dull, generic text and ugly packing slips that don’t pull their weight for your company.
For power-users, ShipWorks offers even more advanced warehouse shipping software capabilities like custom extensions for existing databases such as customized monitoring dashboards.
Enterprise shipping software must adapt to the way a business operates. It must provide the ability to customize the shipping workflow and tailor it to the unique needs of each business. A good shipping software should include customized templates for invoices, packing slips, email notifications, and other basic shipping communications. More advanced warehouse shipping software will include custom extensions for existing databases like monitoring dashboards.
Multiple Carrier Support For Your Shipping Warehouse: Manage And Ship With Your Choice Of Carriers
Effective ecommerce shipping requires easy and immediate access to multiple shipping carriers for order fulfillment. Companies that use a multi-carrier strategy have distinct fulfillment advantages as compared to those that use a single carrier to deliver all of their packages. Utilizing multiple carriers can reduce both delivery shipment costs as well as the time from order to receipt for customers.
Plus, optimize and simplify multi-carrier invoicing with one seamless account that combines invoices from multiple carrier accounts such as USPS, UPS, and DHL into ShipWorks One-Balance for easy bookkeeping and financial analysis. Additionally, ShipWorks customers gain access to major discounts and perks with UPS and USPS—up to 76% off for international services and discounts for negotiated service agreements for faster fulfillment and integrated tracking.
Our Shipping Software Automatically Selects The Best Ship Crates And Carriers For Each Shipment
Rate shopping is an essential tool for any multi-carrier shipping workflow because it provides tools that compare rates for parcels across multiple carriers and mail classes, and, based on pre-set rules, selects the lowest cost option for each shipment. Basic rate comparison features will allow you to visually compare rates across available carriers, while more advanced features will list fuel surcharges for private carriers, offer dimensional weight pricing, and automatically update carrier surcharges to avoid penalties and returned packages.
With ShipWorks automatic rate comparison tool, you can get the best rate from among multiple carriers to choose the right one for each situation without devoting any more valuable time or resources—simply set it and forget it.
Use ShipWorks warehouse shipping software free for 30 days to see for yourself how powerful we can be, yet how easy to implement. If you want to speak to our team about your specific requirements as well as see ShipWorks in action, please schedule a free demo or discovery call here and we’ll be happy to show you around!