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EA-shipper
Occasional Contributor
Status: In Progress

The new layout (v3) has made us spend far more time each day to complete the same amount of work. Here's some of what we've found that has gotten worse compared to the old version (v2):

 

-Scrolling through orders with a mouse scroll wheel stops after only a small distance and requires the use of the scroll bar to scroll quickly.

-Orders per page automatically reverts to 250 orders per page, every time you log in.

-Splitting orders is now very slow to load and all "split" items cannot have different shipping addresses. 

-Inability to restore shipped orders to awaiting shipment. "Restore" in the shipped tab now only creates a new blank line item in the original order that must be manually re-fulfilled in our store.

-Grouping orders by SKU causes a number of bugs like un-grouping orders while using the search function and causing collapsed groups to un-collapse at random when selecting orders. Also, causes unintentional selection of new, unrelated orders when putting one on hold or otherwise removing an order from the group. 

-Putting items on Hold now requires the selection of a new hold date each time, instead of remembering the last hold date selection

 

We have opened support tickets for each of these issues, and more. Sometimes the issue gets fixed, but most of the time, the issue is a core feature behaving differently and cannot be fixed short of using the old version of shipstation.

 

Please let us revert to V2. We understand that shipstation has been working on v3 since at least 2018 when we first tried it, but it is still slower, counterintuitive and incredibly frustrating to find new issues we have to work around every day.

18 Comments
_Mia_
Contributor

The most frustrating thing to me is the fact that most of these issues were reported early and often during the beta testing period and remain unresolved. The number of times I look up an issue and find a thread about it that's 12-18 months old is infuriating. Add to that the complete lack of useful communication from shipstation (stock responses that you're 'listening to feedback' are pretty useless) and it starts feeling like they don't understand/care about how their customers actually interact with their software. These are not issues of 'just learning the new interface', these are core features of the software that are completely deficient compared to the last version. On top of your issues, I'd list a few more:

 

-SLOWNESS. This is the biggest complaint. Compared to legacy, the new version is easily 50% slower. Every time I enter any information or click anywhere, it hangs for 3-5 seconds. This adds up quickly. In addition, when you use a hotkey it often takes 5-10 seconds for the information to 'set'. If you move on too quickly, the settings aren't actually registered and the label prints incorrectly. This basically defeats the entire purpose of a preset hotkey.

-Customs Declaration Layout. In legacy, customs declarations were arranged horizontally in columns and rows which made it much easier to read and edit. The new version is somewhat 'hidden' off to the side and is arranged vertically which requires an excessive amount of scrolling.

-General Formatting. The new shipstation increased the font size and added large amounts of padding around each line of text. It also made 95% of text the same color and font weight. All together, this means less info on the screen (and thus, more scrolling and more wasted time) and also it's more difficult to visually scan for relevant info at a glance. It seems this was made for aesthetic reasons rather than usability reasons.

-Restore/Create New Shipment Issues. When you create a new shipment it duplicates the order but with no items in it. You have to add those in manually. And it's not as though this is an edge case, businesses have to re-ship orders all the time for repairs, replacements, etc. This is a complete waste of time and was reported (and should have been fixed) months ago. Simply copy the items and make it editable so you can remove the items you don't need. This change has completely broken our custom inventory management software which pulled info from shipstation. But when an order has no items, it has nothing to 'pull'.

As above, the interface itself is annoying to wrestle with every day, but by far the most frustrating thing is the complete lack of communication from shipstation. If there is not a reasonable response addressing many of these issues in the next week or two (a detailed roadmap would be ideal), I'm going to recommend to my company that we switch services. Shipstation is borderline unusable in its current iteration and we can't afford to waste so much time every day fighting with the interface.

viktor
Occasional Contributor

Going to add some other bugs for you so that they can be documented somewhere, at least...

  • Batches view now shows orders instead of shipments in the "Shipments" pane. As such, you can only export orders and not shipments(and their tracking details)
  • Printing labels by None(As selected) is now broken; I categorize my labels by weight for sake of efficiency in packing and this feature is now completely broken. Set aside the fact that I can no longer quickly navigate to all the shipments of a processed batch, this feature does not work as intended and I cannot reliably sort and print labels in the order that is preferred by our team
  •  Columns layout for shipments by default is extraordinarily stupid with a bunch of completely irrelevant fields - I had changed my columns layout and obviously the preferences are saved in your browser cache rather than within the profile now for some stupid reason, contrary to how it was in v2. This means that any time that I or clients need to use a distinct computer(or clear their cache for unrelated matters), they lose the majority of their preferences
  • Customs declaration sorting is completely unintuitive as _Mia_. mentioned above. Why would anyone think that we favour scrolling through customs details at a rate of half a page per item instead of seeing absolutely everything on page
  • Hotkeys and jump-to is completely broken on drop-down menus. I sort by country every day and now can't click "C" to quickly jump to Canada. Canada is not so far down the list, but it would be annoying for other countries that are far further down
  • Servers are STILL degraded after several years. Any time I try to print 500 labels at a time, ShipStation times out and rejects the request - I used to do this regularly years ago but now have to split every 500 shipments(view limit) into 2-4 files depending on their size. Obviously not very efficient and the downgrading doesn't really make any sense since it's not any net difference in bandwidth or server requirements. In fact, it adds more stress given more user actions and calls.

I just have no explanation to some of these decisions. They are so blatantly bad and poorly thought through that I can't believe that this has been in development for several years. It doesn't make any sense at all.

Legends
Occasional Contributor

This bothers me the most and lost any trust in ShipStation.

We can only use Shipstation  to  ship orders that are $100 or less.

Any orders above $100 , V3 does not include any added insurance in the final cost.  Even though you click Carrier insurance and it shows full value of the order but  once you print the label the price drops to only include the Standard $100 from our carrier.  Now it's too late, you  have to void the label to get a refund.  How many times do I have to do voided labels. Any order above $100, I have to use another carrier and manually drop them off which is time, effort and gas that I shouldn't have to do. 

 

 

payment
Occasional Contributor

adding to the fun:

creating a return from an order used to autopopulate with the original shipment to the customer's weight, package type, service and dimensions. not anymore - now you have to manually enter that info. 

OZard
Occasional Contributor

Add:

Every time after you buy postage, the next label you print, it will not come out, or prints, click " Create + Print"  the popup says label printed, but it does not, You have to very careful, to miss shipments.  click "Lables" from Shipment, to print it, then print work again.

Alot of extra Clicks,

And Extremely slow on loading,

also V2 the green background are much better color for eyes.

pedalpcb
Contributor

Yep, been struggling with this as well.

 

Mimikins
New Contributor

The new layout is terrible for all the reasons mentioned in the thread. 

 

The "restore" function in particular is vital to our business and we will lose so much time creating new orders every time we have to reship an order. The delivery estimate and rate text is also ridiculously tiny now and had already led to some costly mistakes for our business when shipping with multiple carriers with different transit times.

 

Please allow us to go back to V2. 

pedalpcb
Contributor

I've lost around $8000 in refunds because of the inability to ship replacements since the V3 transition this month.

 

I'm now having to use (and pay for) an alternate service just for the ability to ship replacement orders without having to manually create orders from scratch.   ๐Ÿ™„

 

julio2
New Contributor

I agree. They just forced it on me. I was wondering if there is another shipping software out there that is worth looking at. If I have to spend twice as much time on shipping, then its worth changing from ship station. Its not just about the learning curb. they actually bloated the software and made it unusable running too much code within HTML. 

 

Mimikins
New Contributor

It's now also impossible to check the estimate delivery date after an order has been shipped to quickly see if the delivery was late or not.