Royal Mail Customer Tracking Automation Request

[sjmiller]

I was advised by Shipstation support to post the following request.

We exclusively use Royal Mail's Tracked Services, the most obvious benefit of these service is of course tracking, which is provided by Royal Mail via SMS & Email direct to our customers.

Currently in order to benefit from these options on Shipstation, it is necessary to tick a box and then manually enter the email address and/or telephone no. of our customers.

This entirely elminates any benefits provided by Shipstations powerful automation options and is a giant step backwards compared to our current provider.

It would be highly advantageous to the vast majority of Royal Mail users, if these field were ticked and populated with the recipients details by default, or at the very least the ability to add automation rules to achieve the same outcome would be accetpable. It is very unlikely in our view customoers would not want to receive the tracking notifications we pay for.

We are poised to switch to Shipstation, however not providing customers the tracking notifications they expect, will result in us being bombarded with "where's my order" enquiries. Copying and pasting customer details completely defeats the purpose of using Shipstation and is therefore a non-starter.

I hope this can be implemented as a matter of urgency and allow us to reap the rewards of moving over to Shipstation.

[chrisneal]

@Moderator-Davis The solution listed on that page has to be done manually for each order. There seems to be no way to prefill those fields via the API or via an automation (which is the issue).

[chrisneal]

@Moderator-Davis I see you've replied to other threads but not to my last reply on this thread. Is there any way you can find out if this is on your roadmap? Thanks.

[Moderator-Davis]

@chrisneal, 

To my knowledge this type of "automatic prefill" is currently not on the roadmap, however that doesn't mean that it wont be in the future! I know we are always looking for adjustments to improve our integrations! 

This will absolutely be reviewed by our team 🙂 

[Shipster]

@Moderator-Davis this is very sad (and contrary to what I was previously told at a conference by a Shipstation person). Shipstation is potentially a good platform, but let down with substandard integrations like this. The nearest competitor has this automation available and is also more reliable as it seems to connect to Royal Mail directly instead of via Intersoft, and doesn't go down when Shipstation's connection goes down. I've just had an hour's outage in the run up to collection time so we couldn't generate labels and we were not able to create a manifest, due to "unexpected carrier pipeline error". I'm afraid Shipstation UK needs more love from the dev team to be a serious proposition here, and I am actively looking to migrate away.

[Moderator-Davis]

@Shipster, 

I wish that I had better news to share, and we of course do not want to see you go. I know that we are always seeking out integration improvements but they can't always happen as fast as we would hope.

[chrisneal]

@Moderator-Davis Has there been any progress with this?

[sjmiller]

I'm not sure how long this has been live, but now if you tick the boxes, they are prefilled with the customer email and telephone number. Well done Shipstation.

The Icing on the cake would be the option to select these as default.