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Batch processing to add customs information to international shipments.

Related products:Orders & Shipment Management
  • July 31, 2015
  • 19 replies
  • 23 views

We have 165 international orders from a Kickstarter project (along with about 1,600 domestic). The international orders were imported WITHOUT customs information provided. It would be EXTREMELY helpful to be able to "batch" add information for customs to all of these orders. Just fyi, we do not have these orders linked to "products/items." We would simply like to bulk apply information to all of these orders. Unfortunately, there is not a feature that allows me to do so with customs information. Huge pain...

19 replies

  • September 25, 2015
We have the same issue. This has a HUGE impact on our business, as Kickstarter is one of our main driving forces, and as such we have hundreds to thousands of orders shipping internationally that are exactly the same. Currently the only bulk action available for Customs is the Content type. It would be helpful to be able to bulk edit the description, quantity, value, HS code, and Country of Origin, even if it means that it assumes there is only one line of customs data.

  • September 28, 2015
Please add this function to help our warehouse shipping staff with their international shipments.

  • December 2, 2015
We have the same issue, since we use Stitch and Stitch does not populate customs information into ShipStation. Bulk editing products with this information would also be useful, or adding an automation rule which handles it on a per order basis.

  • December 8, 2015
'@Yatri Trivedi Spytec Inc and @James Takenaka Game Salute - Thanks for adding your comments here! The best way to populate your customs information is to use product defaults (unless the Selling Channel or CSV file you're using does not pass over any line item information like KickStarter in @Herb and @Tim's case). With product defaults you'll be able to automatically set the customs information per product, more info here: https://help.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/206639227 Is this helpful, or is there another obstacle blocking you from efficiently shipping your international orders?

  • December 8, 2015
'@Admin We know we can pull the data from product line data, but it's not helpful. The example is: Let's say we have pencils uniquely identified by SKU by color. A customer orders a full rainbow. If we set customs by searching product line data, we get 7 lines on our commercial invoice that are overly specific. Whereas if we have our default set to just say "Colored Pencils" with a value for the whole set, it's less confusing for customs and actually gets delivered with fewer issues. (and doesn't have to spill over onto multiple pages on the CN-22). 99% of our shipments work like this, with a much better international delivery rate listing the items in sum as one item. However that sum (country of origin, specific description) changes from project to project, so the ability to bulk edit would save many hours of work.

  • December 9, 2015
Ah, that's an interesting case. Thanks for adding that! Just to make sure we're all on the same page, while you can set customs information at the product level through product defaults, the only way to consolidate customs declaration lines is to do this manually. Is that right?

  • December 10, 2015
'@Admin we have been using the customs default settings to always list one consolidated description at one price, but we have to manually update the value in many cases. The quickest way to do it en mass is by using the sidebar plus some muscle memory in terms of number of times to press TAB, but it'd be much easier if we could batch edit the description, quantity, declared value, and country of origin.

I just ran into this issues as well. While I have 1900 Kickstarter orders, luckily I only have one product and the max reward was 5. I have yet to ship, so I'm not sure what it will show on the customs form as they are different colors... HOWEVER on my website I have 2 orders (not a huge deal right now) that are international with 6 and 8 different items. The easiest solution would be to use the "preset groups" for the customs form, instead of the individual product. This automatically merge the line items on the customs form and should be easy to fix I would think. What do you think shipstation?

  • February 14, 2018
Absolutely agree. It's excruciating to manually, record-by-record, add repeat customs information. The biggest failing in the Shipstation application by far. MAKE IT HAPPEN PLEASE.

  • March 27, 2018
Same issue. We ship media and books internationally and customs will stop it when the title of the book is in the description for the customs declaration. If we label the description as "Book" it does not get stopped for inspection. This is a major pain for our international folks so we try to "remember" to update them.

  • April 3, 2018
Hi @Jeff, thanks for checking in. Have you looked into setting up your product defaults? This would automatically apply a more appropriate description every time your the product imports. Here's more information on product defaults: https://help.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/206639227 Alternatively, if you only sell one category of products, you can have your customs description always read as "books". Here's more on that: https://help.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/205900328

  • August 29, 2018
We run a monthly subscription club, so the individual items change each month so setting up product defaults would not work. All of our international labels will be the same in one month, but each month they will change. I can do bulk customs forms in Stamps.com, but for some reason it is not an option in ShipStation. Doing them one by one is VERY time consuming. When will this be fixed?

thomas5
  • August 29, 2020
This is crazy. Why are there all these bulk actions you can do, but only one is to set the customs type?!? What about price? Description? Crazy.

We regularly import huge quantities of items and need to bulk apply customs declaration description, quantity and value for thousands of items at once.

  • February 8, 2021
Yes, a bulk action for adding the declared value would be soooo helpful. We are shipping out replacement parts for a board game, and they all are under $1 value and our default is $15, so if we could bulk change that, it would be so helpful.

  • June 21, 2021
This would be incredibly helpful.

  • July 18, 2021
This would be extremely helpful. I am able to apply presets for almost all other aspects of an order, except for customs declarations, which involve a few fields.

Moderator-Davis
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thomas5
  • May 25, 2022

How is this hard to do? I used to run a web company and had programmers. Adding this function to a site would literally take about 30 minutes of coding and maybe two hours of testing to make sure it works and doesn’t break something else. Probably could even copy/paste one of the other existing bulks with minimal editing.