ShipMonk | Order Fulfillment

I have been running businesses for 30+ years, and I can say, without a doubt, that no single business I have ever worked with has damaged the reputation of my company more than ShipMonk. Make no mistake, ShipMonk is a sales company, and cares very little for their customers once they have signed you up. I strongly urge you to go back through Shopify’s reviews from 2020 and early 2021. Recently, the reviews are all “miraculously” five-stars, and do not sound authentic….sound a bit more like advertisements than reviews. Who knows, maybe these vendors have had experiences with a ShipMonk from an alternate universe. And i would not buy the "COVID, COVID, COVID, we have addressed those issues" line. A Zebra does not change its stripes. Here are my experiences…judge for yourself and beware before getting in bed with these guys. Also check out their reviews on Google. All of my experiences outlined below are well-documented, and if you check out other reviews, you will see similarly bad experiences, though maybe not in as much detail! ShipMonk’s systems are poorly designed, their internal communications are terrible, their email system is very inefficient and frustrating to use, and their customer service is atrocious, both in terms of response time, getting accurate information and maybe most importantly, attitude. It is extremely slow…be prepared to wait sometimes days for a response, which is often unhelpful or inaccurate, and then wait again for their response to your response, etc., etc. Many of their customer service reps are poorly trained, often not knowing answers to basic questions or, worse, delivering incorrect information, and it is almost as if they have been trained to take any opportunity to blame the customer for any issues that arise. All of this adds up to a terrible customer experience, a lot of frustration and stress, and often requires hours each week to sort out their mess, all the while fielding phone calls from unhappy customers due to shipping errors and delayed shipments. A fulfillment center should be taking fulfillment issues off your desk, so you can focus on your business. With ShipMonk, hours a week are spent double checking their work or trying to get them to do what they are supposed to do on time and without being asked. I was with ShipMonk for about a year and a half. They initially flat out misrepresented their capabilities to me. I see from WAMA Underwear’s review, that ShipMonk is still habitually misrepresenting their services in order to sign up new clients. Like WAMA’s, their misrepresentation to us was not discovered, of course, until all of our inventory had arrived at their warehouse. They made very little effort, or displayed any urgency, to rectify the situation, and made no offer to reduce their cost of service, which went up substantially due to their misrepresentation of what they could and could not do, and at what price. All the while, their auto-payment systems keeps pulling funds from your account, while getting any kind of solution drags on and on. I gave them multiple opportunities, and tried to work with them, to make things right, but they were clearly not interested and could not be bothered. It seems their sole focus is signing up new clients, and not providing good service with a good attitude to the clients they have signed up. They have almost an adversarial relationship with their customers, as if you are just a necessary evil to generate revenue and grow. We make and sell an exercise systems. ShipMonk sent our customers, among other things, a dress, a purse, a sweatshirt and tap shoes…yes, tap shoes. They always send you a form apology email, letting you know how they are working to see that this does not happen again…until it happens again. Mispicks, missing items and wrong sizes were also a common problem. Their time estimates for special projects are not to be taken seriously. They almost never meet their own estimate, and instead, deliver excuse after excuse. You cannot rely on their status updates to communicate with your customers, because you have no idea if they will do what they said they will do when they said they will do it, leading to upset customers who rightfully blame you. The costs they charged us for special projects were grossly over-charged, and only after I discovered them and brought it to their attention, did they acknowledge as much. To this day, it is not clear to me whether we were ever refunded the overcharges, and we spent months, yes months, just trying to establish a fair charge for the work (we decided to leave before that was resolved). They provide very little transparency in regards to their costs and pricing…you have to dig into their reporting for the information. Though they have many shipping options, they are rarely the most cost effective. Since leaving, we have found significantly cheaper and more cost-effective rates, faster shipping and improved reliability. The attractive shipping options they quote are before carrier surcharges, which can be as much as 50-80% of the shipping cost itself. They partnered with several carriers during our time with them, who were flat out incompetent, lost packages, did not provide adequate tracking, etc. And ShipMonk will not allow you to follow up on your own to get tracking updates from carriers directly, so you must suffer through waiting for ShipMonk to follow up, which takes up valuable time and rarely delivers any actionable information. ShipMonk does not seem to understand, or more likely does not really care, that they are representing you, their customer, in the marketplace. When they screw up, or take days to get back to you, or ship tap shoes to your customers, the customer does not blame ShipMonk…they only know that you screwed up their order. Such is life with ShipMonk. I hope you find this information valuable. I thought it was important to share my experience in detail with you, to expose what I believe to be a very poorly run and untrustworthy company in the fulfillment space. There are plenty of fulfillment companies in the marketplace, and if you do your homework, you can likely find ones who pride themselves on customer service, and doing their job competently as an integral part of your business. And if something does go wrong, will give it and you the attention you deserve. In our experience, ShipMonk is not one of those companies. They are a sales company trying to grow as fast as they can, and you, as their customer, are of little consequence.

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.