ShipMonk | Order Fulfillment

I was really excited to work with Shipmonk, their service seemed really great. However after 1 year with them I'm canceling my contract because of the constant loss of inventory that has occurred. Pros: Easy to use integrated software that syncs with Shopify and also automatically downloads my Etsy orders. Inventory tracking feature that updated my Shopify stock. When everything went well, being a Shipmonk customer was great. Orders were automatically fulfilled and it saved hours of work. Cons: They lost thousands of dollars of inventory over the course of a year, a fraction of which was reimbursed. When you sign up for their service the terms and conditions say that even though they might be at fault for lost inventory, they are not financially responsible. It was incredibly frustrating having to email their customer service every week to report an inventory discrepancy. I sell unique clothing designs that have a high production cost so I suspect staff members were stealing my products each time an order was fulfilled. Their Happiness Engineers were always very apologetic each time I reported a claim, but failed to solve the issue or explain why my inventory continually went missing in their warehouses. The rare times that Shipmonk did agree to reimburse me, they only gave me a $10 credit per unit which was a small percentage of the production cost. The lost inventory has negatively impacted my business' reputation. Because of Shipmonk's errors, each month I had to message customers to apologize that their orders could no longer be fulfilled. Many of the missing products were irreplaceable. Their software syncing system would list products as in stock on my website, then suddenly change to an inventory level of 0 when the order was being fulfilled, changing the order status to backordered. Because of Shipmonk's negligence, I've lost thousands of dollars worth of sales plus thousands in lost inventory.

Shipmonk is terrible at what a 3PL should be great at: communication with its customers, shipping time, shipping accuracy, and warehousing. They've shipped another company's products to our customers, multiple times.

I am looking forward to never having to work with this disaster of a business again. We have issues with them on a weekly basis and their support is almost nonexistent. We have been assigned new account managers several times over the past few months. Their billing is almost always incorrect, they love to charge for made-up expenses and then not be able to provide sufficient justification for them. It seems that they have just grown way too quickly without proper infrastructure. I would not recommend working with them. They are many other reliable fulfillment centers in the US where you have real customer support and boots on the ground.

AN UPDATE WITH ANOTHER HORRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE:

i had to ship a wholesale order that weighs 60 lbs via USPS which normally would cost around $90 via USPS (nonnegotiated rates) , they charged me $527!!!
and the insane part is that since it was a wholesale order, the cost of shipping was TBD until the package was picked up by USPS which is too late. i call to let them know to intercept the package as i did not get a chance to approve this and the order i was shipping is not worth more than $250 in its entirety!!! but NO help.

this is an update to my previous onboarding experience which was another fail, the app works fine even though it overcharges but the minute you have an issue - they OVERBILL or just abandon you.

previous review: Horrible onboarding with so many details on their support pages and almost no syncing with shopify system - had to enter everything manually (they would have the SKU as the product name, the weight in ounces put in lbs), and then the receiving of products is miserable (they again overweigh products & overcharge on shipping and you cannot even edit to the right weight - an 8oz bottle could be weighed as 1 lb! Or even more! ) i regret sending them a whole stock, i should have started with a few items The team talks nicely and try to help but it feels like they are overwhelmed with their system and work flow themselves so the help they end up giving is subpar. in the end of the day, if i am outsourcing my shipping, you need to be a well oiled machine and a cheap alternative to in-house but they are anything but! Also our first big delivery with them was a big big big fail, we were overcharged with UPS because of their weight "errors"above - they split up 1 big order to 8 orders which were not packed professionally, they did a miserable job with taping up boxes and putting heavy items in a no-bubble plastic envelopes like true beginners and arrived to my client all destroyed.

SHITTY APP AND SHITTY PROVIDER! STAY AWAY FROM BY ALL MEANS!

I have used ShipMonk for a few months. From the first moment, I had a horrible experience. When something is horrible from the beginning, it is horrible throughout all of the time.

Communication is HORRIBLE. They kept making on-going MISTAKES all the time. They were giving me FALSE pricing. When I wanted to stop my relationship with ShipMonk, it was A PAIN IN THE ASS to leave them.

All in all, being an eCommerce entrepreneur for 15 years, ShipMonk has been absolutely by all means THE WORST SUPPLIER I have ever used.

S-T-A-Y A-W-A-Y FROM! THERE ARE TOO MANY BETTER OPTIONS OUT THERE!

Update (10 Nov 2022): Amanda has helped me with this issue, but I'm sorry I'm not going to remove this review until the ASN-932731 issue is solved. There is a total of 33 cartons but not even 5 cartons are received. UPS says the packages were already received since October 4!! Worst experience ever!!! Stay away, either you are a small or big business!! I've lost over $35,000 WORTH OF INVENTORY and it has already been 2 WEEKS! There have been tens of emails back and forth with the customer team, and all they've been replying is "asking me to confirm if it is true!" Unbelievable! I have all clear evidences that my inventory has been delivered successfully, with the name of the person signed, the correct ASN number, the correct SKU (with pictures), and the shipping label. To Kimberly, Darius, Mahogany, and Wen (the person who signed and received the shipments- 34 HUGE CARTONS): Please get this resolved within this week. I'll not remove your names until I get an "actual help", not "asking me to confirm the correct information over 10 times already".

My experience with Joan was fantastic. Answered all my questions and made the onboarding process smooth and really easy.

Terrible. Absolute nightmare the last few months we were with them. Cost us thousands of dollars in documented direct losses due to numerous shipping mistakes and lost and/or misplaced inventory on orders for just one account alone. We were assessed chargebacks, fees and losses due to inaccurate carton contents, shipments that were short units, shipments that were over units, late shipments and packages that were missing necessary documents.
Numerous emails and calls to them communicating instructions and identifying concerns and issues but they still made repeated mistakes. Repeatedly provided us with inaccurate info regarding shipments and status. Due to inaccurate inventory numbers, we repeatedly asked them to provide us with an inventory report but took them weeks to provide.

We've been using Shipmonk (and their associated Shopify app) for more than a year now.

The onboarding process is fairly easy and they help you connect your store to their fulfillment center, and map the SKUs to their internal inventory codes. You can also do it yourself manually if you create product bundles, for instance, or they will do it for you if you have a lot of them, just by sending them a CSV.

From that moment on, Shipmonk automatically captures the orders from Shopify, processes them, and then inserts the tracking number once the order has been fulfilled.

So all in all, it is a very straightforward process and the only work you need to do is check their interface daily to verify no orders are "stuck" because the buyer entered an incorret address, or you have run out of stock of any item (which you shouldn't, as they provide a forecast on how many days of inventory you have left at the current sales rate.

All in all, very satisfied with their service and the timely delivery of the orders to my customers.

I would highly recommend not using ShipMonk. I'm providing 2 stars because their UI is great, and the sync with Shopify is helpful so that we in theory don't have to update our inventory on a consistent basis (which in reality is not the case). If you have under 100 SKU's they may be a fit, we've been using them for a few years and everything was fine until we really starting scaling our inventory levels and SKU count. Then came receiving issues, lost inventory (and by default overselling to our customers and having to cancel orders), and sending the wrong product to our customers - as in not even inventory sold from our store (we sell dog merch, our customers have received human supplements, perfume, etc). I had to track down and reach out to the other stores separately to make sure they were aware their product (sometimes worth $100+) was being sent out to the wrong customers so they could also file claims. The lost inventory has been the biggest headache for us. When I say lost inventory I mean hundreds of units (some SKU's have a >6% shrink which ShipMonk claims is normal) that have gone missing within a few months, and no reimbursement with often what I would consider odd rational - they couldn't store everything in a single bin, therefore it's not their fault. Money drain! I will say different from other ShipMonk reviews I have mostly had good experiences with their CX team, and I think the bigger issue is that there are larger wide scale systemic issues with ShipMonk and the CX team is either not equipped to handle or they truly have no idea what happened and that's that. My negative experiences have been when agents will resolve a ticket when the issue is not fixed, so I've had to reopen tickets just to make sure they actually respond. Overall - I would keep shopping, not worth it.