Feedback - Shipstation Connect printing defaults and printer transmission issues

[TSRSM-John]

I recently reached out to Shipstation Support and was advised to post my issue here as feedback for the development team.

Since updating in early August, Shipstation Connect persistently resets my printing preferences. It also frequently prints to the wrong printer (ie. I select my Brother printer to print a packing slip, and Shipstation Connect sends the document to my label printer instead). It's very irritating for my staff and results in a waste of labels.

Shipstation Support attempted to troubleshoot these issues with me but ultimately there was no resolution. The agent said it had something to do with the update, but didn't have any suggestions to fix it.

[coalfield]

Frequent printing to the wrong printer is an issue for me, especially for end of day.

If I set the printer as the default for printing I am them stuck with the wrong printer and have to reset everything.

• Out of interest how many printers do you have? 
• Also are you printing to a shared printer?

I have 2 printers that are shared via connect.  Both are network printers.

At the moment I select my main printer, and it goes to the Adobe download prompt.  No idea why, and its must be a SS Adobe prompt because I don't have a 'print to Adobe' printer shared.

[TSRSM-John]

@coalfieldWe have multiple locations, 5 workstations in total using Shipstation Connect. Each computer is connected to at least two printers that are shared with other workstations. We used to do a lot of remote printing, but since the forced update to Shipstation 2.0 that has become unreliable and we've had to come up with other solutions. Sometimes a printer will be selected that is connected to one workstation but the document will be sent to a printer connected to another workstation, sometimes even in another building in another city.

We encounter this issue most often when printing end of day, but it can also be a problem when printing shipping labels and packing slips. Shipstation resets our defaults almost daily, sometimes multiple times throughout the day. The default settings are the only thing preventing the documents being sent to the wrong printer—it's when we choose a printer manually that this error occurs. 

I've considered instructing my staff to do away with Shipstation Connect entirely. It used to be very convenient, but now it just seems broken and more trouble than it's worth.

[coalfield]

I am curious why this is not a wider issue... I too have shared printers and multiple.. I am not sure if this is the same situation with everyone but I would this this is very easy to replicate and hence find the problem.  Must say I am a little frustrated by it I love SS in my workflow but have never use the 'old' versions so probably good I dont know what I am missing.

I do see a lot of bugs, especially in the UK which I am fine with but the thing I am starting to realise is they are not getting fixed or taking a long time.  I get the impression SS has a large user base and hence income, so would hope issues like this would be prioritised as its kind of fundamental to the usage.

My solution if in doubt is to save as PDF (via prompt) and then print from there.  I have one browser set to always prompt so if I have any issues I flip to that browser.  I cannot begin imagine how frustrating it would be for you with it printing to a different location 😫

[Moderator-Davis]

Hey there! 

I appreciate the ShipStation Connect feedback here and I assure you, we are looking into these matters. One thing I want to clarify is that if you are using multiple workstations but all are logged into the same user profile in your account, you may see these behaviors. I'm not certain that is the case here, I just wanted to add that heads up. If users are logged into the same profile in multiple warehouses, they could be inadvertently be switching the printing settings for the other. 

This settings reverting and wrong printer behaviors that y'all have mentioned are both things that we are wanting to get to the bottom of. If you haven't done so yet, please reach out to our support team at support@shipstation.com with that full breakdown of setup and workflow details so that we can get you added to the investigation update list for those respectively. 

[TSRSM-John]

Hi @Moderator-Davis. We have unique user profiles for each workstation.

I've also reached out to Shipstation support regarding this issue twice now. Both times they recommended that I post feedback on this forum.

[coalfield]

Thanks for the feedback @Moderator-Davis .

In my case I am not logged into multiple workstations, just the one however I am frequently loggin into different browsers on the same workstation, with the same instance of Connect running.  This could be a reason for the wierd behaviour and why its not more widespread issue for others.

I will try to see if I can get it working one Chrome, and then not use Edge and see if this smooths out the experience and will feed back!

Note, I have contacted support but not given them a breakdown of my setup as such yet

[Moderator-Davis]

Thank you both for laying out your workstation setups! Any/all of that information can help paint a more complete picture for my team. 

[stnfrustration]

I have issues with Shipstation every single day now and have to spend about an hour with Support who take forever to fix it and ask the same questions every day and it's so frustrating. Spending an hour during peak holiday shipping time every day with this garbage is so ridiculous. It will print about three labels, then stop for no reason, says it prints the other ones but it does not. They have to send me pdfs of the labels seperately, then that doesn't work becuase it will then say the printer is offline. I try logging out of shipstation connect and back in and that doesn't help. sometimes after restarting computer it works but then the labels are all messed up and overlapping. wtf is going on. why can't there be a permanent solution to this madness?