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ShipStation launched four major feature updates— Automated Rate Shopping, Returns and Exchanges, Analytics, and Inventory and Warehouse Management — designed to support businesses in every stage of growth.
Key takeaways:
- Automated Rate Shopping is an advanced rate shopping capability that enables online retailers to save money with the best price on every shipment. This new capability automatically surfaces the best value, fastest delivery time, and cheapest shipping service based on a customer’s predefined criteria, while also accommodating specific business needs. By optimizing carrier selection, this new feature allows businesses to find the most cost-effective and efficient delivery options without manual effort.
- Returns and Exchanges helps online retailers combat lost time and higher costs due to returns. The enhanced offering includes a branded customer returns portal for a seamless self-service experience, an intuitive admin interface providing a centralized user-friendly control panel, and comprehensive return merchandise authorization lifecycle management that brings clarity to the whole returns process. The feature easily integrates exchanges, allowing additional products to display, encouraging upsell and helping businesses retain more revenue. The entire experience is streamlined with powerful return automation which drastically reduces manual effort, speeds up processing, minimizes errors, and transforms a historically complex process into a positive, brand-building experience for retailers.
- Analytics is for businesses navigating e-commerce complexities but lack clear insights into crucial operational metrics. Analytics is designed to transform raw data into actionable intelligence. Expanding ShipStation’s existing capabilities, seven new reporting dashboards give users a comprehensive view of their shipping operations, including product performance, sales trends, inventory, warehouse efficiency, and revenue versus fulfillment costs. Businesses can now confidently forecast profitability and uncover inefficiencies to drive growth, as well as optimize carrier performance, delivery times, and shipping spend to save money and enjoy an efficient customer delivery experience.
- Inventory and Warehouse Management capabilities help customers address critical challenges such as overstocking, stockouts, and inventory inaccuracies. The new features include forecasting tools to more precisely align stock levels with anticipated demand, purchase order functionality for easier reordering, and lot tracking for precise batch management. A new mobile barcode scanning integration will also streamline the inventory receiving and picking processes, significantly increasing efficiency, reducing inventory discrepancies, and accelerating order fulfillment.
