Knowledge Base

2022 was a hectic year for the shipping industry. From distant issues like the war in Ukraine and solar flares affecting GPS systems, to more domestic concerns with fuel prices and inflation, just about everyone has been stretched far beyond what is comfortable in order to operate their business within expectations. While not all of those issues are behind us, we've made great strides in both our system and operation to provide as much value as possible to our customers and minimize these issues for their operations:

• Help Desk/Wiki - Our migration to the Zendesk platform for managing tickets and requests helped streamline our overall support process, including major improvements on overall response time from the development team. At the time we switched to ZD, we consistently had around 130 open tickets at a time, with a lot of manual work to clean up those tickets each week; now that number is closer to 50.
  
• Batch Processing - Major improvements were made to the overall process flow of batching, allowing more orders to be processed at a time with a lower overall hit to server performance.
  
• Azure Migration - Our move to Azure from Rackspace was undoubtedly one of the biggest tasks of the year, involving a lot of consolidation and reorganization of our system components. Prior to this move, customers were experiencing outages in the system for the first time, in part due to added features and functionality in the system that pushed the original servers past their limits. Since moving to Azure, the system reliability has greatly increased, boasting a 99.999% uptime since the migration was completed, as well added security and greater scalability for our customers needing more customized environments.
  
• OrderTrack/Reporting - With the expected sunsetting of OrderTrack in the near future, our support team has copied all reports from the OrderTrack system to SHIPSTORE Reporting for cloud customers. Users are now able to search for 1 year+ of data in the system for reports, and are able to create and export reports with much more ease than OrderTrack allowed for. You're even able to see the detail of the records you see on the Reports page!
  
• Invoice Reconciliation (beta) - Last year, we added the ability to import carrier invoices for a small set of carriers (UPS, FedEx, GLS, and BetterTrucks). This functionality allows you to run reports on the imported data from the Reports screen, including a Reconciliation report that can compare invoice data with the data that was recorded when the shipment was processed in SS and highlight differences in the rates. This functionality is still in beta as we work to ensure the data that is captured in this process is accurate and the reports are easy to understand, so please reach out to our support team if you would like to try out this feature.
  
• Managed Services - With the ever-changing landscape in this shipping industry, we have worked with several carriers (including UPS, FedEx, and USPS) to obtain rates that we can also give to our customers in SHIPSTORE. If you are interested in seeing if we can provide savings with these rates, please reach out to our sales team at info@shipstoresoftware.com to start the conversation. Our agreements with each carrier vary, so we are not able to provide these as blanket rates for all customers by default.
  

Our main goal for 2023 is to further streamline the system to improve the overall experience in the system. The last 2 years have been full of new features in the system, and we feel it's time to rework the UI so these added features can be more easily accessed and display better information. Below is the list of changes we are planning for the year:

• January update - This week, we will be releasing our 2023Q1 update for the cloud environment (link here). This update is mainly focused on improvements to batch processing to fix sporadic errors such as "No label found" and "Order data not found" in the cloud environment.
  
• SSv5 - While we mentioned this would be released that year in our 2022 announcement, we decided to put extra time into the development of the new SHIPSTORE version so the rollout is as clean as possible for all customers. SSv5 is primarily a major overhaul of the UI in SHIPSTORE, including shipping screens, administration, etc., that should greatly reduce transaction times in the system as well as provide greater flexibility when pulling/exporting large sets of data. Expected release of this system to our cloud customers is mid-March.
  
• Merchant app - Similar to the above, we will also be releasing an updated version of the Merchant app later this year after the SSv5 rollout is complete. This update provides a much cleaner install experience for users, as well as greater reliability in its connection to the SS servers, reducing the need to restart the app.
  
• Help Desk/Wiki - While our move to Zendesk was very successful, we found there were certain limitations in ZD that were hard to work around for a B2B business like ours. For this reason, we are migrating to Teamwork Desk when we apply the January update. No changes will be needed in how you contact us; the same email address and contact forms you use today will be pointed to TD at that time. You may see some small changes in the format of the tickets you get from our new system, but those differences should be pretty minimal.
  
• OrderTrack - OrderTrack will officially be sunset for all customers in June of this year in favor of SHIPSTORE's built in reporting. We are working on transitioning the last few accounts now, and will provide a notice when the official sunset date has been set.
  
• Consolidated Invoicing (beta) - Along with the managed services we added last year, we've also built out the capability in our operation of creating consolidated invoices from individual carrier invoices. This is a new offering for us, and is dependent on the carriers you would like us to consolidate, so it is not something we are offering to all of our customers just yet, so please reach out to our sales team at info@thelogisticsstore.com for more information.