Packages by carrier/service per store report over a date range

[BrianRoden]

I recently received a request from our VP of logistics asking for counts on how many packages were shipped over the past year via UPS Ground, UPS 2-day, UPS Next Day, FedEx Ground, FedEx Home Delivery, FedEx Overnight, FedEx 2-day, etc.

To pull this together, I had to download Excel files from Reports, Raw Data Exports, Shipped Orders. Of course, when I tried to select the date range 8/1/22 to 7/31/23 to export to Excel, it failed saying the data set was too large, and to try a smaller date range. So I tried just 8/1/22-8/31/22. Still too large.

Ended up having to split Aug 2022 into 6 different download files. 8/1-8/3, 8/4 by itself, 8/6 by itself, 8/7-8/15, 8/16-8/23, and 8/24-8/31.

Notice that 8/5 isn't there, because when I tried just that one day, I got zilch. And if 8/5/22 was included in any export attempt, that export would fail. So some glitch in the data in ShipStation made certain days inaccessible.

I lost a lot of time having to whittle down date ranges to get valid exports, and even then the largest Excel file was 8 MB. I've done much larger exports from Linnworks and other systems we use. ShipStation really needs to make these reports capable of handling larger data sets in a single report/download. In December 2022, for a few individual dates I even had to split up the exports by store so the files would be small enough to be generated by the unreasonably limited system that exists.

And then of course, out of 51 columns in the download files, I only needed 5 for my analysis (Shipment ID, Carrier, Shipping Service, Label Create Date, and Weight Oz) to build a query giving me the count of packages for each carrier/service and the average weight of packages using each carrier/service pair. If I could have selected just the columns I needed, I wouldn't have had to split up the date ranges so many times, since each data set wouldn't have been as large.

Maybe ShipStation could add a feature like Linnworks' Query Data screen in their Dashboards section, and publish the database table schema (like at Custom Scripts: Database Structure (linnworks.com)) so that customers experienced with databases can write custom queries for data extracts. If ShipStation had something like that, I could have pulled that data together for our VP of Logistics in less than 30 minutes, instead of fighting for 4 hours just to download all the shipment records I needed.

Also, a pre-built report that takes a date range as parameters would be helpful for generating summaries like this for logistics planning. Shipments by carrier by service by store over the specified date range. You could even let users select for all stores or one store at a time, as the Shipped Orders raw data screen does. 

At the bare minimum, make the existing reports/exports capable of handling a full months' worth of data at a time. Performing 12 exports (1 per month) would be much preferable to 79.