Hello everyone, and welcome to 2022!
 
We're roughly 1 month into the year, and officially past rate change season for the major carriers, so I thought I would reach out and let everyone know about our planned goals for the year and what we are doing to improve every aspect of what we do today and provide you the best experience possible. 2021 was an exciting year in terms of growth and overall change in the shipping industry. Moving forward we'll be releasing more announcements like this in an attempt to further engage with our customers and get a better sense of what changes/additions are needed to improve the shipping process for all of our customers.
 
2021 recap
2020 and 2021 were big years in terms of changes. With Covid-19 causing havoc in both personal and work lives, there was a lot to adjust to. As such, these 2 years were huge for us in terms of development and building out SHIPSTORE, both from functionality standpoint as well as performance. Some of the key highlights were:
 
  • Carrier Usage - While in years past UPS and FedEx would want to eat up as much volume as possible, 2021 saw the first year in which both carriers consistently charged extra for and/or outright refused additional business. As a result of this, SHIPSTORE has partnered with more and more regional carriers to meet the transportation needs of our customers. We've also added line haul/zone skipping functionality to the system to allow users to group parcel shipments together under a single LTL/line haul transaction, allowing SS to both capture the line haul charges for each box, as well as tie data together from a tracking standpoint. We also saw much higher volumes of packages going through the USPS network due in part to the recent changes UPS and FedEx made to their mail offerings (i.e. Mail innovations, SmartPost).
  • Extra carrier charges - related to above, due to the extra volume that UPS and FedEx were seeing (along with the covid challenges), both of these carriers implemented additional charges for high volume shippers. As a result, shippers were either forced to pay the extra charges, or balance the volume out with other carriers. This was an ideal solution for SHIPSTORE to help solve as we could leverage the power of our rateshoppping and business rules to distribute the volume more evenly to the carriers that wanted said volume.
  • Batch Processing - At the beginning of 2021, we rolled out our updated Batch Processing module with increased throughput and multithreading speed. This update was received positively by most users, as it dramatically increased batch processing speeds. Unfortunately, portions of this update did not work well under higher volume environments initially so it took a bit of back and forth with those customers to improve the process for batching for those accounts. Using what we've learned, we've further improved this process for all involved, and can now confirm the system can generate up to 200+ labels/minute during batches with little effect on other users of the system.
  • Ticketing system - Towards the end of 2021, we completed our transition into the Zendesk platform for support ticketing. This system has already proven to increase overall visibility and reporting of tickets, and we are continuing to improve upon that with more automation and structure for our support process.
 
What's coming in 2022?
While 2020 and 2021 were years focused in product growth, 2022's focus is on streamlining the process. This includes optimizing the system to work better in higher transaction environments, as well as improving our internal process flow for customer requests and suggestions.
 
  • Help Desk/Wiki - In furthering our use of Zendesk, we have migrated our wiki to Zendesk's Help Center. With this move, we are able to link support requests to articles within the system that might help answer any questions you have, and/or allow you to solve issues without the need to contact support. This portal will also act as our communication channel for system updates (including allowing comments on pages), and will also let you access your support tickets. To get access to this portal, please sign up via the button on the top-right of your screen.
  • Batch Processing - Based on metrics that we have gather through the last couple months of 2021, we have developed some major improvements to the process that we released to the cloud environment on 1/16 (releasing to Enterprise customers on 2/8). This revamped process will have a much lower impact on the database in the system, preventing any slowdowns experienced by users not batching, while also allowing for more shipments to process at a given time.
  • OrderTrack/Reporting - OrderTrack has been a vital piece of our business for years, and essentially was our first foray into the cloud environment. That said, the system was never meant for the volume it is receiving now, and as such the system has not performed well in recent history. To address this, we have merged OrderTrack's reporting functionality into SHIPSTORE directly, allowing you to create and modify your own reports in the system, and assign those reports out as you see fit. This update released initially to cloud customers on 1/16, and our team is working to copy your reports in OrderTrack to SHIPSTORE so you can begin using this functionality. Along with this update, SHIPSTORE will now be able to search through the archive for shipment data, so if you need to pull data from 6+ months ago you no longer will need to contact support.
  • Invoice Reconciliation - Further enhancing the reporting aspect of the system, we will be adding in functionality to support carrier invoice imports for certain carriers, allowing you to run reports off of the invoice data as well as reconcile the billed records against the quoted records in SHIPSTORE. This update will be released for cloud customers towards the end of Feb. If you have specific carriers you would like enabled for this process, please reach out to me directly (email below) with the carrier and a copy of your billing files.
  • Internal processes - As we have grown in terms of functionality, so too have we grown in terms of company size. As a result we are reworking our internal processes to be more concise in terms of how we complete projects and interact with our customers, as well as redesigning our project implementation process. Our goal with these changes is to improve the overall experience our customers are receiving, whether that be with customizations or core updates.
  • SSv5 - While we've been hard at work in adding functionality to the current version of the system (v4), we've been diligently working on the next evolution of SHIPSTORE. This version is built on the same powerful engine that is in place today, but with a much revamped UI and data handling component, allowing the new version to handle larger amounts of data at a time while still remaining very snappy in terms of performance. We can't want to showcase the product later this year! To make sure we get this right, we would like to invite our customers to beta test the platform before it gets deployed in late Q3 of this year. If you are interested in becoming a beta tester for the updated site, please send me an email so we can add you to the list.
 
Thanks, and Happy 2022!