House Plant Home review for Shippit | Shipping & Delivery

Sept. 8, 2022

I've used this app since starting my business and while I've found some aspects good - multiple courier options, easy to use platform, instant booking for same day collection (potentially) and reasonable shipping rates. However, the negatives can't be ignored either. While you used to be able to chat with a customer service rep they were very unlikely to be able to assist with anything other than follow up with the courier company on your behalf which did save some time for you as the business owner, on occasion. Now they've all but removed Live Chat which to be fair was often pointless for locating missing packages (you could get the same info from the actual courier dashboard) but was handy for assisting with platform issues when I started out. I'm assuming the removal of Live Chat is a cost thing but it makes it impossible to get immediate assistance and even when someone does open a chat with you, you could wait up to 10-15minutes between sending a message to being responded to, yes, each question/message not including the initial queue time. Another negative is the long delay (2-3months in some cases) between sending a shipment and the supposed additional courier charges being charged to your account. You're totally unable to dispute/avoid the charge unless you either significantly overestimate the cost of shipping or you weigh and photograph each order keeping a record of dates etc. But even then there can also be a 'manual handling' fee from some couriers (so forget sending anything slightly fragile) which you have no way of disputing at all. This significantly impacted the courier services I could offer my customers. I may as well get an account with my preferred courier - something I am considering. Oh and don't even bother trying to get any sort of compensation for couriers damaging or as in one case eating the gift you've sent! While I understand Shippit are company to make money (like all of us) it's also a service and it's frustrating that they happily bump you up into the next subscription tier but you have no way of going back down if your sales are slow or you need to pause your store, for whatever reason, unlike Auspost where you simply get charged more if you haven't shipped a certain volume. Also agree with other reviewers here - the Auspost integration is all but useless. And the more recent integration with Shopify just doesn't seem to work as I still have to open the Shippit platform to send orders which I have to double check thoroughly as often if I'm resending a recurring order through to Shippit I will find there are multiples of the same order with each refresh! So unneccessarily time consuming. It seemed to work much better without the latest integration. And I still can't get the instant print integration to work as there is no option to adjust the size of the default label printout despite using standard labels/sizing etc and any time I've requested assistance I'm just re-sent a link to the same instructions. There really doesn't seem to any technical understanding from the reps on troubleshooting this. Overall, there are some good points with using Shippit (potentially same day collection but that probably has more to do with my local courier who is gruff but almost always collects the same day even if I book at 3pm) and I still do use them but only because the alternatives aren't able to offer anything different/better yet (sadly) for my current business. However, their customer service is appalling and it only seems to be getting worse. I will be using either Auspost for my next business as the headaches just aren't worth it.