New Layout Feedback

[shipspeed]

Hi.  I've been using shipstation for 6.5 years.  I print about 200-300 orders / day.  Some days this can be anywhere from 500-1,000 orders.  I have spent the past week using the new layout, and am incredibly disappointed in the direction the developers of this software have gone.  I'd like to share some of the issues  i have run into:

1.  Quick Ship - Users like myself enjoy being able to quickly print batches with a single click of a button.  But now, even with "Quick Ship" activated,  you have two equally bad options for "batch printing".   Option one includes the miserable pop up that interrupts your flow with shipping cost information, and any errors with addresses, etc.  The other option is the batch simply appears in the label que, after which you have to manually select "Label"  for the orders to actually print.  Neither of these are "quick" as the name implies.

• If there is so much as a single order with an issue, such as missing a digit in a phone number, or an invalid address, etc.  nothing will print until those are fixed.  The entire batch is held hostage to any problematic orders. [i would have preferred the batch just printing and leaving the orders with issues behind to fix afterwards] 
• If you exit out of the "pop up" box too quickly [after already confirming everything],  none of the orders will print, and you must manually print the labels from the label queue.  This is a terrible feature.  It lends itself to entire batches to go missing if the user is not aware that it never printed in the first place.  For instance, if the user is printing multiple batches in a short amount of time, this "feature" makes it very easy to lose track of which batches printed or not.  The labels should auto-print after confirming the shipping costs, regardless if the box is closed or not.

Developers:  Please make a setting to allow users to have a true "quick ship" as it was in the old layout.  A quick and simple way to print batches,  no pop-ups.  "Create + Print Label" should do exactly that with no interruptions.  

     2. Individually Printing Orders  -  In my workflow, there are times when i need to go through my awaiting shipments batch to find individual orders.  This means i'm using my arrow key to scroll down, and printing the label as soon as i see an order i need to print.  I used to be able to do this quickly and scroll through my orders fast while printing each label fast.  Shipstation was able to process all of these and print them no problem.  However, in the new layout, shipstation is horribly out of step. 

 If the user prints individual orders "too fast",  certain orders will appear to process by showing up in the label queue as "completed" [as if the print job was successful], however, shipstation skips printing them.  This is incredibly deceptive and leads to orders disappearing from the batch but never physically printing from the label printer. 

For example, say i'm individually printing order 1, 2, and 3.  They all show up in the label queue as completed, and our label printer will generate some labels. This gives the user the impression that all the labels have printed successfully, after all, they all show up in the queue as completed, with no errors.  But upon further investigation, the user will find that only order 1 and 3 were physically printed.   Order 2 was apparently created "too fast" and was "skipped" by the software.  The user now must manually check the orders that printed and figure out which one needs to be "reprinted" because the software could not handle it at the time.

Developers: Please look into this issue or reach out for more clarification, it ruins the workflow and leads to many orders being lost and undetected

       3. Splitting Orders / Splitting Orders User Interface - It seems that in the current iteration of splitting orders, the user cannot split the same SKU, its either all or nothing.   For instance if i have 10 units of SKU: ABC,  i cannot keep 5 units of ABC in one order, and 5 units of ABC in the other.  This seems like a ridiculous "downgrade" feature, considering this was possible in the old layout

• Another issue with the user interface is when interacting with one part of an already split order.  If i split an order, and then later on realize i need to further split a part of it, the contents of the entire order appear in the user interface.  For example, if i have an order with 100 line items, and then split it to be 80 line items in one split and the other 20 in the other.  When the user attempts to split the 20 line item portion to make a third split, they are now bombarded with all 100 line items  in the user interface and have to find the few line items needed to split the order further.  In the old layout, this would not have been a problem. This is an inconvenience. 

Developers please look into "split orders" and some of the nuance involved.  Individual SKU's should be able to have their quantities split from the user interface, instead of the "all or nothing" approach.  Splitting an order that has already been split doesn't need to show the entire order, this can be an inconvenience for the user.

I have a few smaller issues that i have noted, but these are the more significant ones from my experience.  Overall i feel as if shipstation has deliberately made it more difficult to quickly print orders, and furthermore making it easier to lose track of orders that should have physically printed but did not due to software issues / limitations. 

Overall i cannot say that the New layout was an improvement from the old layout.

[Moderator-Davis]

Good morning @shipspeed, 

I appreciate you providing this feedback to us. The level details included around the actual workflow you're going thru in this report are very helpful for our team. 

One thing I'm happy to report back is that you can indeed split individual SKU quantities if desired! Please review this specific section of our knowledge base article for those steps. While it may not be your ideal situation, it should be possible so I wanted to share in hopes it can help in the meantime. If you find these steps are unsuccessful, please reach out to our support team right away to make that report. 

[shipspeed]

Thank you for pointing that out about the split shipments.  That is great to know