Brands4all review for ShipHero Inventory & Shipping

Feb. 9, 2018

We have been using Shiphero from circa summer 2017. When we first stumbled upon their app inside of Shopify App Store, our first thought was "finally, an app that promises to address all our everyday problems" with regards to stock syncing and general warehouse management. For the most part this is how it has gone down, and quite honestly, any persisting issues we might be having are due to our delay to adapt to a different workflow. Our biggest issue before Shiphero was that of syncing our warehouse stock to three, yes three! shopify stores, all selling the same products but each targeting a different market in terms of geolocation and currency. Prior to Shiphero, we had been experiencing major problems with this task alone. Some apps were master of stock only, but then did not have the capacity to sync the full volume of our products. Others were also master of price, but masters of price did not master their slaves sufficiently and other similar problems. Then Shiphero came into play and off went most of those problems. Please note that Shiphero is only master of stock! Master of price was addressed in a different way. To top it off, we are now syncing two warehouses, each hosting around 100.000 variants to three Shopify stores trouble free. The only "problem" we are having in this schema is that the inventory is slow when fetching all those data from Canada (we are located in Greece - more on that later). So if you are looking for an app to do just that, there's no need to read below. Stop here. Install the app, put a smile on your face, and move on with your life and business. If you need more than just syncing your stock to one, two, three, or more stores, then Shiphero is probably the app you are looking for too. For that job alone it is much cheaper and much more efficient than any other Shopify app out there which we had the bad luck to use. Besides the online dashboard they are also offering an iPod/iPhone app and an iPad app which is promising to do your pickers' and packers' everyday life easier, more productive and more efficient. As much as we wish there was an Android alternative as well, for iDevices are far more costly and not everybody has one, however that comes down to ones adjustability. If you are thinking of using Shiphero read the rest of this paragraph carefully! You will have to purchase the hardware they are suggesting you purchase. All alternatives simply won't work - believe me we tried many! It seems like a matter of bluetooth connection protocols. Standard connection via bluetooth is HID and this replaces your keyboard, which is not what you want. Socket scanners are pricy, but totally worth their money in the long run. They can use a different protocol which appends the scanner to the input methods, the battery lasts forever on a single charge, it's light and quite responsive and you are not expected to have any problems in everyday use with rare exceptions. When it comes to picking, you will have to create a bin system so that you can assign products to bins and let Shiphero know of all this information. Creating bins, and pairing products to bins in as large a warehouse as ours was A LOT of work, but totally worth it at the end of the day! To put it in plain words, after you've gone through all of that you will be able to give an iPod/iPhone/iPad and a Socket scanner to any arbitary individual (preferably choose one with no prior warehouse working experience), instruct them what is the logic your warehouse is set up and they will be able to go fetch products from your warehouse in minutes! We had to come up with a bin system of our own, to better suit our warehouse, which spans a total of four floors. Shiphero's workflow is the following: A picker with an iDevice and a barcode scanner sets off towards the warehouse with a cart. The cart is host to a number of totes. One tote is a container of an individual order's products. The picker goes to the warehouse, uses the app to locate an item's exact location, picks and scans the item (heads up: items should have barcodes on them too!), is told what tote to put the item into, places the item and moves on towards the next tote. The picker continues like this and at the end of the picking procedure they will have completed picking an equal number of orders to the number of totes. They are then bringing their cart to an available packer, leave their cart and take the next available cart (with new, empty totes) and set off again. Then the packer can check the items of every tote, can pack the order, can use a scale to weigh the package, can print an invoice from within Shiphero, can also print a shipping voucher from within the app and have an order ready to ship, all this from within the app itself. Amazing! Now, I used the phrase "the packer can + verb" because, although Shiphero can do all of that, however we are not using all those features ourselves. The reason why we don't is a mixture of not wanting/needing to and not being available to yet. Allow me to explain. Our store, like mentioned above, is located in Greece. Shiphero does not support out of the box connection to any of the most popular local shipping companies in our country and they aren't to blame for that - it makes sense why they don't. Since we already had set up a stand alone software (custom made) for that job before Shiphero, we did not justify the cost and effort of creating a new one, but instead kept on using that alongside Shiphero, and it is working just fine as it is! We are using neither their scale options, nor their invoice printing or shipping voucher printing. We are a very happy Shiphero users team and very satisfied at the value for money ratio! And now comes the time for the most important part when dealing with external apps. And that is none other than software support! How could I express myself in a way that would suffice to explain how great their support is?! Nicholas, Martin, Yosef, Aaron, Adam, Belen, Amanda, Patti (guys and gals please forgive me if I have forgotten somebody) can be proud of their patience, and customer service skills. Rarely have I needed to contact an app's support department as often as I have done with Shiphero (especially during setting up everything for the first time), and even rarer have I enjoyed such a welcoming response each and every time! To better explain how great their support is, please consider yourselves, how often do you receive emails from an external app's support when you have not contacted them for an extended period of time, only to be asked if you have been experiencing any problems with their app lately, if you have any concerns of suggestions for further improving their produt, and all of that without their promoting any other products of theirs after their expressing their "interest"? Our only "we-wish-for" of ours would be, we wish they offered 24/7 support sooner than not, since their being located in New York and our being located in Greece, sometimes renders communication slower than desired. So, if you've read this far, you might be asking yourselves "This app sounds like perfect! Is it so good, or is it too good to be true?". In a nutshell, it is pretty good, but, like all things, it is not perfect. If you value a very good product, rich on features, bundled with an awesome support, and are willing to pay little extra for that, then look no further!!! Konstantinos Sakkas - brands4all.myshopify.com