As a small ecommerce business, you’re focused on running the most efficient and cost-effective operation possible while simultaneously delivering exceptional customer service to build loyalty and drive repeat orders. And with increasing customer expectations for a speedy and seamless ecommerce experience, satisfaction hinges on getting the right product into the hands of customers quickly and without disruption. Indeed, a fast, cost-efficient, and scalable shipping process is a critical component of your company’s success and growth.

However, selecting a solution to automate and streamline your shipping practices can seem a daunting task. What features do you need? How much will it cost? How do you determine which software is the best for small businesses like yours?

While there are several shipping platforms on the market, the Descartes ShipRush™ solution emerges as the clear winner for small ecommerce businesses—whether you’re operating out of your garage selling small quantities of goods on Etsy or operating on multiple marketplaces with substantial physical inventory.

ShipRush: Small Business Champion

ShipRush is an easy-to-use, multi-carrier parcel shipping platform that helps small ecommerce businesses automate fulfillment processes for parcel and LTL freight shipments across 90+ sales channels to boost productivity, cut costs, and enhance the customer experience.

Small businesses at all stages of the entrepreneurial journey can reap the benefits of the user-friendly ShipRush platform. Is ShipRush right for your small business? Let’s review the type of small business customers ShipRush supports:

1.    Micro Customer

Many businesses start off as micro businesses or ‘side hustles’, shipping small quantities of products and expanding over time. These types of customers typically ship 1-10 parcels per day. They don’t sell the same SKU over and over again and have no real inventory management requirements.

ShipRush offers a free plan with discounted shipping rates for micro customers that provide parcel shipping for up to three users. And, ShipRush provides free customer support, regardless of your monthly shipping volumes! When you’re just getting started in your shipping journey, you don’t want the expense of customer support. Our team is here to help you set up and configure ShipRush—for free and with no restrictions on the time needed to help you ramp up.

2.    Multi-Channel Selling Customer

ShipRush customers that send between 20-50 shipments per day (~1,500 shipments per month) are typically small businesses who need a shipping solution that enables them to aggregate orders they generate on multiple online sales channels.

At this level, saving time becomes more of a priority. These customers want to avoid fulfilling orders on each individual marketplace. Instead, they’re focused on sales in aggregate for fulfillment and parcel shipping: one view of orders for fulfillment, one platform for communicating back to marketplaces (i.e., fewer steps for the merchant/shipper because ShipRush is managing fulfillment and communication to marketplaces).

In addition, multi-channel selling customers may be looking for the ability to create a branded shipping experience, such as branded emails, tracking pages, shipping labels, and packing slips.

3.    Customer with Warehouse Operations

These customers are typically direct-to-consumer brands or wholesale distributors using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system like NetSuite or a warehouse management software (WMS) as a backbone for their ecommerce operations. They send anywhere from 100 to a few thousand shipments per day, often facing high volume spikes resulting from sales campaigns; they typically distribute from one or even multiple warehouse locations.

What these businesses need for fulfillment excellence is highly accurate warehouse and inventory management, efficient and accurate pick and pack processes, and shipping automation to ensure they keep their promise to their customers and always deliver on time.

For these customers, ShipRush comes pre-integrated with NetSuite and with Descartes’ suite of ecommerce warehouse management systems (WMS), providing a unified technology solution to drive optimal warehouse and shipping performance.

ShipRush Delivers

At Descartes, we understand that small ecommerce business owners are hyperfocused on providing an exceptional customer experience to build a loyal clientele and grow the business. To this end, ShipRush delivers extensive shipping features and cost-saving and efficiency benefits to help you delight your customers—and you don’t have to be a tech whiz to be up and running in minutes.

With ShipRush, you can take advantage of highly automated workflows to save time, quickly connect sales channels, and easily manage them all in one place. Plus, your small business can save money with the cheapest carrier rates and enjoy free customer support via live chat, email, and phone, regardless of which ShipRush plan you choose. And as your business begins to grow and require more advanced ecommerce functionality, ShipRush offers seamless integration with NetSuite and warehouse management systems (WMS) built for ecommerce.

Again, ShipRush provides free customer support no matter the size of your business. Whether via email, phone, chat (verify channels) our dedicated team of customer service professionals is here to support your shipping operations.  To learn more about how ShipRush can help your small business transform its shipping workflow to boost the top and bottom line, visit our home page. Plus, discover how ShipRush helped automotive tool manufacturer PipeKnife increase order entry and processing speed by 100%, while reducing net freight costs by 33%.