NZ Tack Saddlery Co review for ShipStation

Two stars, and it is a shame, because the actual software itself is great. The ability to find orders by scanning a product barcode was essential to our business model, and ShipStation is the only software we found that can actually search for an order by product barcode. The barcode verification for packing has pretty much eliminated our packing errors, and the ability to set up custom parcels has been great too. The software and the automations are genuinely good. The problem is the importing and syncing of orders, especially after changes are made in Shopify, plus continuous ongoing bugs, and for us that outweighs everything good. ShipStation only imports an order once. So if you remove hold tags tags, split fulfilment, or update the shipping location afterwards, it is impossible to get it to sync. We ship from multiple retail locations, and a location change in Shopify simply will not update in ShipStation. We have had orders sit for more than a day without updating, and worse, after a location change orders have flipped to showing as cancelled and refused to load at all, once while our courier was literally waiting at the door and we could not get anyone on the phone. Order splitting is another one. If you split an order in Shopify it does not create two shipments in ShipStation, and we were told we would have to call support to split every order manually on their end, which is not realistic when you split several a day. There is also no way to hold a shipment and release it later, and no way to automatically reprocess rules, so you are constantly clicking Reprocess or calling support to fix things by hand almost daily. The multi-location handling is the core failure. Other shipping software uses child accounts so each location has its own synced account. ShipStation's only answer is separate user logins that each see their own orders, which does not fix the syncing. Even adding a missing barcode to a product in Shopify will not sync back to ShipStation for that order. Barcode scanning also pulls up orders that have already shipped, and the status filter clears every time you scan, which has caused orders to be shipped twice. Onboarding was a nightmare, over a month of daily emails and it still was not right at the end. Great software, held back by sync and reliability problems we cannot work around.