As a small business owner, you understand the need to provide outstanding customer experience (CX) to keep your customers happy, leaving rave reviews, buying more and recommending you to others. That said, ensuring the smooth yet cost-competitive delivery that customers expect 100% of the time is an area where many small ecommerce businesses fall short.
Did you know that buyers aren’t happy with the inconsistent delivery performance they’re experiencing, according to this study? And a sizeable number are ready to feel or act negatively towards ecommerce retailers who fall short of their delivery expectations? Whether in the form of damaging reviews, lost sales, higher customer service costs, etc… The results of poor delivery performance can be significant for small ecommerce businesses.
The study found that nearly three-quarters (73%) of consumers experienced a delivery failure in the last three months of 2021, with issues stemming from late deliveries (26%), deliveries not arriving when promised (22%), and time windows for deliveries that were inconvenient and too long (22%). Most notable of all: almost one-quarter of the respondents said they won’t order from that problem retailer again.
How do your shipping practices measure up?
ShipRush: Small Business Champion
While improving home delivery performance is challenging, Ecommerce retailers who understand that delivery processes can make or break a good buying experience and take action to ensure they have the right shipping practices and technology in place are able to drive top- and bottom-line performance gains. Specifically, selecting the right shipping solution for your small ecommerce business makes all the difference in providing a superior delivery experience for your customers and helping you scale and grow.
But how do you choose the best software for your unique needs?
Let’s take a look at two shipping solution options you may be considering: Descartes ShipRush™ and ShipStation. For small ecommerce businesses, we believe ShipRush is the standout choice, outperforming ShipStation across numerous categories and offering extensive shipping features and cost-saving and efficiency benefits to help you meet your customers’ shipping expectations.
With ShipRush, small business customers enjoy our amazing customer support, carrier flexibility, cost-effective pricing structure, and extensive great integration with the other technology platforms you might already use, and lots of options to help your business grow (more advanced ecommerce functionality, such as NetSuite integration and warehouse management systems (WMS) built for ecommerce).
To help you choose the best shipping solution for your small ecommerce business, let’s review the numerous ways ShipRush is the optimal choice for your shipping requirements:
1. Free customer support
We believe in fully supporting our ShipRush customers to grow their businesses, regardless of where they are in their entrepreneurial journey. This commitment means that whether you’re shipping one or 100K parcels per month, you have access to our free customer support via live chat, email, and phone with a real human.
We meet you in the place you want to be to communicate with us, with no restrictions on parcel volumes, no restrictions on which user contacts us, and no restrictions on the amount of time we spend with you to get you up and running.
Other software providers place a shipment volume limit on free customer support; typically, your small business needs to ship more than 5,000 parcels per month to receive free support. At ShipRush, you know you’re going to be taken care of regardless of the size of your business because we’re focused on building a relationship with you to help you scale and grow.
ShipStation, on the other hand, requires a paid plan to receive customer support, and its least expensive plan offers customer support only via live chat, email, or a community forum. To expand customer service to include phone support with ShipStation, you need to purchase one of the paid subscription plans that includes it. We provide free ShipRush support via live chat, email, and phone for all our plans, including those on our free plan.
2. Get started for free (with multiple users!)
ShipStation does not offer a free plan. In contrast, the ShipRush free Starter plan is an excellent way for small businesses who are just starting out to reap the benefits of an automated shipping platform.
Like all ShipRush plans, the free plan includes: unlimited shipping, deeply discounted rates, real-time rate shopping, international shipping, super-fast label printing, frictionless shipping insurance, robust reporting, custom branded shipping experiences, free phone, live chat, and email support, and more.
The ShipRush free Starter plan includes three users who can access all of the same functionality (unless configured otherwise by permissions, rights, roles, or responsibilities). Conversely, ShipStation’s lowest-priced plan includes only one user. To add more users, you need to pay additional fees or subscribe to the more expensive plans.
3. Unlimited number of shipments – no matter the plan
Regardless of the plan you’re on, ShipRush offers an unlimited number of shipments at no additional cost! ShipStation, however, has monthly shipment maximums associated with every plan that it offers except for “High Volume”. Depending on the price of the plan and the volumes associated with it, there are shipping costs per label that can vary significantly. And ShipStation ‘counts’ return labels, any external fulfillment (like FBA), or any “mark as shipped” order processed using the system as a single shipment. With no limits on the number of parcels you ship each month, ShipRush provides even greater value for the price of its plans.
4. Free unlimited “Bring Your Own” carrier accounts
With ShipRush, you have a wide choice of carriers at no extra charge, whereas ShipStation charges a fee for bring your own (BYO) carrier accounts, requiring shippers to use the “Your Carriers” addon. This feature adds a monthly fee to the subscription cost for ShipStation, and it varies by plan.
Your Carriers is included at no charge for the High Volume plan, but ShipStation still charges a $0.08 label fee for every label printed from a Your Carriers account.
By contrast, ShipRush offers you the flexibility to use as many carrier accounts as you need at the same monthly price. For instance, you may need four UPS accounts because you operate as four different brands. ShipRush never charges extra fees for BYO carrier accounts.
5. APIs that work for you
While ShipStation has some API capability to access data and manage select shipping tasks, we make our entire library of powerful ecommerce, shipping, and rating APIs available to ShipRush small business customers.
You can count on the efficacy and seamless interoperability of ShipRush APIs.
ShipRush has APIs for carrier connectivity as well, enabling you to build front end shipping forms while we take care of integration, certification, services, etc. with the carriers. This process saves ShipRush customers hundreds of thousands of development hours.
We have a dedicated team working on API development, consistently adding and/or making changes to new carriers and services to make them available via APIs for our customers.
6. We’re with you all the way
ShipRush is more than a shipping platform; it’s part of a family of ecommerce solutions that help small businesses scale and grow. Today, your business may be operating out of your garage, selling on a single marketplace. But down the road, you may offer more products, expand your customer base, and add new marketplaces—and your shipping needs will change.
As your small business outgrows the garage and expands into a warehouse, we can seamlessly transition you to other solutions to support your business, such as Descartes OzLink Mobile Warehouse, or our ecommerce warehouse solutions Descartes Peoplevox and Descartes pixi. You can keep your own ShipRush account and start using new interfaces with any of these solutions. You even have the option of adding other products (e.g., TMS, denied party screening, or customs classification) to support your fulfillment needs as you grow.
Since ShipStation is essentially a parcel and LTL shipping solution, shippers and merchants using ShipStation have to partner with different vendors (i.e., multiple contracts) for these types of solutions to scale their business as it grows. With ShipRush, on the other hand, you have only one contract to manage as your business moves upmarket—a unique feature that sets us apart and makes your journey to success a smooth one.
In the ShipRush vs. ShipStation battle for small business shipping excellence, we believe ShipRush is the winning choice, every time. To learn more about how ShipRush can enhance your ecommerce shipping with automated workflows, carrier rate discounts, real-time rate shopping and more, visit https://shiprush.com/. Plus, watch a video of how ShipRush helped Wizard Distribution reduce shipping costs by 40%!