60 day Order Activity Deletion

[it21]

Why would you have all order activity & history delete upon 60 days automatically? This is information that should stay indefinitely with any order that is created. Your agent replied that "If we did not delete history after a certain amount of time, that would be an exceedingly large amount of data to store." which may be true, but its one reason why we are paying for your software & service. Besides cutting-cost on your end financially, there is absolutely no benefit to any users by doing this. Please allow Order Activity to be retained indefinitely on any order. If you were in fact so limited in your data-storage capacities, then why can't you actually delete an order vs. 'cancelling' it upon which its record is retained indefinitely (taking up precious data storage space)???

[CalebP]

Do you have more info on this? I just pulled up several orders over a year old without issue.

[it21]

Any update on this?

[it21]

'@ Caleb - Yes orders are retained indefinitely, but not the "Order Activity" information.

[rich2]

'+1 In this day and age it should be pennies per customer in disk space needed to continue storing this for a long time. Didn't see Caleb respond to ShipStation's question, so I'll add my two cents that we probably attempt to look at order activity older than 2 months about once every other week. We use it for a variety of reasons. We'd need it less if the Order API gave us a Ship Date with an actual time. The value over the API is clearly a timestamp because it has hh:mm:ss, but it goes unused. Going into ShipStation is needed to find out what time the shipment was created, but if we do this after two months we screwed.

[rich2]

Going to mention an ebay review period has passed and I'm trying to investigate a late delivery from just over two months ago. Depending on the region, most of our ebay rating periods go back at least 3 months. Unfortunately the order activity is gone. It would have been helpful to know what date the order was imported on, and with what status. Especially since I have open ticket about ShipStation importing unpaid ebay orders as paid. I've been told that I need to contact ebay. I'm not the one who advertises I integrate with ebay. The order activity would help with this data collection, especially if ShipStation believe I need to be the ebay liaison for Every.ShipStation.Customer.

[Tim25]

I have to add that this is incredibly frustrating for us as well. We're on a monthly billing cycle with our clients, so if they're only one cycle behind on looking at things and have a problem, we can't see which employee screwed up. And especially when dealing with international shipments that take 6 months to be returned to us, it's impossible to investigate anything. At a bare minimum, it should store history for a year. You're storing plain text data (or it should be plain text data), it doesn't take that much space. If you're not, at 60 days instead of deleting it, convert it to one plain text field. A support worker suggested I could do that myself using internal notes. Which would cost me about $25,000 in staff time, annually. Maybe when ShipStation first started, storage like this was a concern, but with hard drives now being measured in Terabytes for low-end consumers, I find it hard to believe that it's still an issue.

[eric21]

This is a significant challenge for us as well. From an export compliance standpoint, you must retain records for years, not 60 days, on tracking info, dimensions, weights, changes to orders, etc. Many of these items aren't even recorded if the shipment isn't made within ShipStation (but is logged via "mark as shipped"). This makes ShipStation unscalable for a mid-sized company.

[chan]

I also have this issue of the order activity being deleted after 60 days. Our Customer Service uses Shipstation to look up all shipping information for a customers order. If it happens to be older then 60 days its useless to look up the tracking for the customer or to see where/who the order got messed up. I know we would be willing to pay extra for that data and I know other companies would pay as well. PLEASE MAKE THIS A FUTURE ADDON!!!

[Rich]

Agreed, this is an issue for customer complaint investigations, audits, etc. If storage is an issue, why not base it on plans?

• Starter = 30 days
• Bronze = 60 days
• ...
• Enterprise+ = Indefinite