ShipBob Fulfillment

ShipBob has been an absolute disaster to work with (moved over to them in March 2023). They consistently ship my products out without sufficient packaging and void fill, resulting in damaged goods and bad customer experiences. (I sell books and magazines—predictable shapes and sizes, so this should be easy!) Despite numerous promises that they will address the problem and follow very clear instructions on how to pack my products properly, they are still doing a terrible job. In addition, their interface is very slow and poorly designed. The one star is that they are fast at getting shipments out the door, but obviously, that's because they seem to toss everything into a box without any concern.

The app itself works fine. However dropoffs and pickups are routinely missed and inventory is too often lost. Human interaction with the warehouse is not timely. It works fine for small parcel, but as you scale to containers and pallets you will have issue after issue.

There is some good, and a lot of bad with this company.

Good: They ship orders promptly. They integrate with a lot of different ecommerce service providers.

Bad: Their shipping prices are ABSURDLY high. Shipping shoes from Texas to Colorado with ShipBob is $46. With Shopify Shipping it's $10. I cannot ask my customers to pay that much, so I have been eating about $18 of shipping on every sale. Storage - they talk about $40 per pallet and a price for shelves, without telling you how much can fit on a shelf. I can fit all my inventory on 22 pallets. So should be $880, right? But they are storing it on shelves and charging me $2600 a month. When a customer returns an item, shipBob takes 10 days AFTER IT ARRIVES, to even acknowledge arrival, much less inspect the product. Customers cannot wait that long for refunds or exchanges so I am processing those all manually early, taking the risk of damaged product. They use sketchy shipping subcontractors that leave your product sitting in a warehouse for a month on the regular. They lose packages in their own warehouse before pickup and blame the carrier. I am moving all my inventory out as we speak.

The app is only as good as the company behind it and in this case the company is rotten to the core. They can't do the fundamental aspects of shipping right. It takes 5 days for them to take inventory in and they use the cheapest most unreliable shipping subcontractors. Their customer service is TERRIBLE. TERRIBLE. The kind where you get 4 emails back from 4 different people each indicating that they are "working on it."

I wish I could leave zero stars! Beware! The damage has already been done to our business. Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere unless you are looking for a shipping company that cannot ship!! 10+ days for fulfillment during the holidays, mispicked damage and lost parcels, inventory processing delays, the list goes on. They use OSM worldwide for their affordable pricing plan which still ends up being $14-20 for packages that we would normal ship first class for under $6. They claim free dunnage and packed with care but we had to submit claims every day for damaged deliveries.

Our customers were furious and our customer service team worked over time by the damage to our business has been immeasurable. We are no on day 12 of waiting for our inventory to ship back to us. AGAIN THIS IS A SHIPPING COMPANY THAT CANNOT SHIP!

Customer service is outsourced, slow, and just “escalates” with no resolution. I can keep going on all day with the immeasurable headache shipbob has caused.

Their management is pathetic. Their warehouse employees are lazy. This company will not last if only the truth got out.

BEWARE

*UPDATE
Our inventory was returned by ship Bob. Everything was thrown into boxes, including the glass products. We filed a claim and waited 120 days they took zero responsibility and denied our claim. Shocker. We are filing a lawsuit.

The app works smoothly. We've had some challenges working with their customer support but they are committed to making improvements. Overall good experience with Shipbob.

We have worked with various 3PLs but have had the best experience with Shipbob. We love working with our account manager Samantha Diapolo, we always receive excellent communication especially during an emergency situation.
I give this 4 stars because we are still working through some tech issues but will be happy to update once this is all resolved.

I used shipbob for 3 months. Worst experience ever, They could not handle simple requests, it took over a week to get any quality response back. They have not been fulfilling orders for 2 weeks for us but are still charging us for fulfilling those orders. You could not pay me enough to use them again. They are not a good partner for your store and not good at the one thing they are supposed to do.

Shipbob has put our amazon account in jeopardy with a 16% late ship rate. Technical support is a carousel that goes nowhere. They have an online "chat" window, where the representative does basically nothing but open a support ticket - which go unanswered. Additionally, they sent boxes of assembly parts to a customer (who had no idea why he got these miscellaneous plastic rings). This led to us having to product to assemble, costing us revenue. Most importantly, just google "Shipbob" and "BBB" and read the number of Better Business Bureau horror stories about Shipbob. Or just look at reviews and see how horrific the stories are. The onboarding is very slick, they put a lot of energy into getting you on, but they can't get products out, nor do they offer technical support that is useful or helpful.

If you are in the market for an Australian based 3PL, avoid Shipbob at all costs if you value your time, money or sanity!

Short summary of our experience:
- SO MANY lost parcels due to use of cheap carriers.
- Once parcels are lost, the overseas support team have no idea how to resolve the issue and they build up with no resolution, leading to upset customers.
- Overcharged based on the agreed pricing which they refused to acknowledge for approx 4 x weeks. They finally folded and agreed to credit us the over charged amounts over 6 weeks ago and the credit has still not been received after 6 follow ups.
- Increased our pricing without prior notice or our consent.
- Storage is double the market rates.
- Inventory receipts overcharged (over $450 for 6 x pallets).
- Any issues raised take weeks to resolve with multiple follow ups.

Dealing with Shipbob was one of the most frustrating experiences our business has encountered over the last 3 years. Since moving to a new 3pl we have been very happy we are pleased Shipbob no longer consumes hours of our day.