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.

The team, answered all my questions kindly and easily. Instructions were clear they were easy to reach, and above all provided me with the best experience in 3PL industry unlike any other. Thank you once again Katie for your professionalism and kindness

Making the move to partner with a 3PL for our eCommerce site was pretty scary! But Pascalle and the team at Shipmonk have gone over and above in supporting us during the transition. We've been super impressed with their communication and timely responses. We'll definitely be recommending Shipmonk!

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.

Everything about them is amazing! From my first sales call, to every onboarding call since, Shipmonk has been the most seamless and comforting aspect of my journey in e-commerce. They are kind, helpful, and extremely knowledgeable, and they always put me at ease. I always look forward to calls with Shipmonk reps (Shoutout to Pascalle and Charli) because I know they'll always be able to help me get my stuff sorted out especially when it seems a bit overwhelming. Can't recommend them enough!

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.

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".

Very responsive and helpful Customer service, Specially good experience with Anthony!

Our onboarding rep, David Lowthorp, went above and beyond for us. During a chaotic time for our company - my first time using a 3PL and also our company getting ready to launch - David made sure everything on the Shipmonk side of things was seamless...he actually made it fun! I was a bit daunted by the process, but having him walk me through it, at times, step-by-step, and at all hours of the day, made things incredibly manageable and made me confident in my ability to manage future inventory deliveries and confident in our companies ability to provide a swift delivery and excellent experience to our customers. I couldn't be happier with the onboarding experience at Shipmonk, and specifically, David. If it's any indication of whats to come I know we are in excellent hands and made the right choice with this 3PL. I will definitely be recommending them to all of my friends and colleagues in need of one.

What fulfillment company locks you into a contract and charges you to get your goods back if you're not pleased with their service!? Horrible experience, the charged us almost 3x more than our current fulfillment provider. The system in which inventory is imported is confusing at best. My gut feeling is the measurements are off so they can charge more for storage. we were paying more than 2x what we pay now for storage. Over $5,000 worth of our shipmonk inventory ended up on ebay months after we bit the bullet and moved all inventory to another fulfillment. Yes Our Items Were STOLEN after They charged us thousands of dollars to pick up our inventory! WTF If you're reading this don't make the same mistake we did!