"AVOID AT ALL COSTS - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED"

We signed up because we needed a service that would allow us to fully automate our sales funnel. In particular, we needed cheap storage and to outsource packing and shipping our products. Having mastered the art of SEO, ShipWire is the only company you will find for several pages, and it's a shame we didn't keep digging, because what happened to us was, basically catastrophic.

We signed up because we could quickly and easily setup an account, define products, give them a credit card for automatic monthly billing, connect it to our PayPal account to ship out orders as they come in, and then ship them our inventory. All for $24.95/mo. since the amount of merchandise we were shipping was less than a certain amount of space taken up as advertised as being what they would store at that rate.

We would never log into ShipWire.com again unless it was either to send more inventory to their warehouse, make changes to existing products, or investigate some sort of a shipping issue. Every company we have ever done business with does the same thing if there is a problem with charging our account (like if a credit card expiration date has passed), which is either call, write or email the contact information you give them when you create an account to ask that the bill be settled somehow. They may also leave you a message in your account on their website, for you, but, you will be notified via e-mail at the very least, if not also by phone or, in the increasingly rare case, by postal mail.

Indeed, we hadn't logged into the account in months because not only did we have no need to make any changes to our account or resolve any ordering issues, we never received any email or phone calls telling us things like they have considered our account to be abandoned. Or, they haven't received a payment from us recently. Or, if you don't reactivate your account, send us a payment, or otherwise contact us, we will take the $3,500 worth of retail merchandise in our warehouse and destroy it.

One day, we did happen to log in, because we needed to confirm the amount of inventory in stock for an upcoming sales campaign only to discover several horrifying anomalies. First of all, we had an unexplained balance of nearly $1,500! At the rate we signed up for, that would suggest we hadn't made a payment in over five years! We had only been a customer for less than two years at this point. I contacted our financial institutions and none of them could find any records of any declined charges being made by ShipWire. We also checked every page to look for a message, a banner, an icon or some other kind of notification that might explain this bizarre anomaly. Due to the absolute lack of any reasonable explanation on the website, we could only believe that there was some kind of terrible accident involving the database that supports their website.

Because not only was there this balance that made no sense to us, there was also apparently less than 10 items of our merchandise in stock. We e-mailed ShipWire demanding an explanation but we also reviewed the Terms of Services Agreement and other fine print on the website to see what might be going on here.

As for the $1,500 balance, apparently, ShipWire reserves the right to wait some indeterminate amount of time to eventually increase your monthly bill by about 2,000% without notice. As bad as that is, it still didn't explain why it showed they didn't get a payment for three months when they had billed my credit card at the appropriate $24.95 just one month before the account was marked as "abandoned." There is also a cryptic definition given for an abandoned account. Ultimately, it is considered "abandoned" if they try to contact you but after several attempts, you don't respond.

This takes me to the third and final point which is that they officially consider you "notified" if they leave a message for you on their website. This message never results in an email to you (as it does in the case of other companies, like your bank for example). Indeed, we never received one phone call, one email, or one letter in the mail from ShipWire that we would have nearly $4,000 worth of merchandise destroyed unless we respond. Had we known that they were going to change our minimum rate to pay to $500/mo., we would have closed our account and demanded an immediate return of our inventory.

UPDATED: To add insult to injury, the FALSE claim was made that we opted out of e-mail contact from ShipWire.com. Not only did we not do that, even if you opt out of e-mail from a company, they will Still send you messages to collect on a balance due on your account with them. The only circumstances under which you would opt-out of receiving email communications from a company is if you are asking not to be sent marketing (upsales) e-mail. Again: All we did was, sign up for a $24.95/mo. service, add product listings to our account, connect it to PayPal so they will get our orders, and ship them our inventory. None of that was nor should be in violation of their ToS. Regardless, any violations should have been provided via written notice to us via mail or e-mail, which did not happen. That is a clear cut case of an unfair business practice.

After weeks of emailing, failed attempts at setting up a phone call (for what purpose remains unclear) until eventually, some rep confirmed all of this. Interestingly enough, there were no messages left anywhere on their website for us to check at any point in time. But even if there was, the point is, we were never given a fair opportunity to rescue thousands of dollars worth of merchandise.

This is a text book bait and switch, and text book unfair business practice.

Find another company that does what they do. DO NOT risk your merchandise in their hands. You WILL lose it. I cannot express in strong enough terms how dishonest this company is.

"Rebranding?"

Alright let's be honest. My business venture didn't go as planned. And yes, when i started out with shipwire, the customer service was a little slow (2 years ago), BUT EVERYTHING WORKED as advertised. If you read TOS, they follow it. And they even bend the rules for you!

I had a very small business, which failed, and for personal reasons I didn't have time or energy to fix these problems. BUT shipwire was really understandable, and even if I had several months notice before they begun to have a minimum $500 monthly usage, I got 2 months longer for free due to my problems!

Customer service became so much better over the last year, with almost instant response over email, they always took care of me and asked if I had any more questions. Great great great!

Alright, for small businesses or "projects", I can't recommend using shipwire because of their $500 policy. But from my experience, serious and good service, this is a small price to pay. So if you have a little ambition, sell things that has a profit margin bigger than $20, do it!

A lot of complaints come from people who haven't read TOS ( Terms of Service ), just make sure to get to know every rule, detail and price, and you will have no bad experiences.

Thanks Shipwire!

"Poor Quality & Even Worse Ethics"

There are only two types of Shipwire customers – Those who are bitterly disappointed, and those that will be once they have used Shipwire long enough to uncover this service’s many flaws. Shipwire has an “F” rating with the BBB and for good reasons.

Below is a summary of some of the issues I’ve encountered followed by a more detailed description of the problems and causes. I closed my account with Shipwire and have transferred my business to another provider. This saddens me because I had hoped Shipwire would be a shipping partner that could help build my business. They were not and so I’ve moved on.

Summary:
-Loses your inventory and then won’t compensate you for the loss.
-Hidden charges / misleading pricing.
-Poorly trained and ineffective customer service.
-Inconsistent policies from warehouse to warehouse.
-Inability to handle wholesale orders.
-Poorly packed items.
-Known service issues not reported to customers.
-Other issues too numerous to describe.


Shipwire Isn’t a Fulfillment Company – Although you would not know it from their web site, Shipwire isn’t a fulfillment company. They are really a web service that hooks your web site to various warehouses that sub-contract to them. This business structure has profound ramifications for customers:
• Since each warehouse operates independently, there is no mechanism in place to coordinate shipping practices --the most important of which is scanning products during packing to ensure that the correct product is shipped to customers. Shipwire warehouses don’t scan product UPC bar codes when fulfilling orders. Rather, they rely on employees pack the right items based on looking at the product package. This means that fulfillment is subject to human error and sometimes those errors can be catastrophic. Over the years, I’ve had consistent issues with Shipwire mis-shipping product to customers. The most serious case occurred when Shipwire began fulfilling a case (six units) of product to customers who had only ordered one unit. This resulted in $4,000 worth of lost inventory. When I alerted Shipwire to the problem, Shipwire’s customer case department ran in circles for 3 weeks trying to understand the problem. By then, the damage was done. Shipwire then refused to compensate me for the loss claiming that I should have purchased their insurance to cover such losses. After months or back and forth discussion on this, we finally settled the matter, but I needed to eat $1,000 in losses and I needed to buy their insurance coverage to insure against future losses. Expecting Shipwire to be perfect isn’t reasonable. However, expecting them to cap losses and to act honorably when mistakes occur is reasonable. Unfortunately, that’s not how Shipwire operates. Taking out insurance for fire, flood or theft makes sense to me. Asking customers to insure against Shipwire’s own incompetence is outrageous. By the way, the deductible for this insurance is either $500 or $1,000 depending on the plan you choose. Even if you buy insurance, you can loose $1,000 in inventory each year with no recourse. When I finally decided to move to another provider, I asked Shipwire to return my inventory and the inventory went missing again. Shipwire claimed that the inventory was lost by the carrier but could not provide tracking numbers. After weeks of back-and-forth calls and emails they finally submitted the claim to their insurance company.
• Shipwire claims that they save customers money because customers can place orders in multiple warehouses and ship to the customer from the closest location. While that sounds good in theory, it is only true in practice if the package sizes in various locations are the same. Since Shipwire doesn’t own the warehouses, the packages aren’t consistent warehouse-to-warehouse. An item shipped a shorter distance may be sent in a box that larger than one available in a distant warehouse. This means that you won’t get the savings you might expect. Likewise, US warehouses may automatically breakdown cases to fulfill orders, but foreign warehouses may not. That means you need to contact the foreign warehouse and initiate a “Special Project” to have this done. It’s a pain in the neck to do this each time the contents of a case need to be removed for fulfillment and such projects take 5 days right now. Your customers will need to wait 5 days before the order is shipped.
• Customer support is a game of telephone --- When a problem occurs, or a project needs to be initiated, Shipwire customer care passes the request to another group within Shipwire that then contacts the employees at the various warehouses. As one might imagine, this is inefficient and leads to plenty of miscommunication.

Hidden Charges – Shipwire’s order pricing is misleading. When a customer uses Shipwire to fulfill, they are forced to use Shipwire’s FedEx, UPS, and other carrier accounts. Any discounts that you might normally receive from these carriers will be lost. Shipwire charges you rack-rate pricing and pockets difference between the rack rate price and the one they actually receive. Basically, they steal the discount. This is not disclosed on their web site. Since the US Postal Service doesn’t have a discount structure like the other carriers, Shipwire adds a service charge on to the cost of all USPS fulfilled orders

Customer Service – Shipwire customer service is not acceptable. The individual reps are not to blame. It’s management’s responsibility to properly train the reps and make sure they have the tools needed to solve customer problems. My experience suggests that this is sorely lacking at Shipwire. I’ve had experiences where customer service reps provided instructions to me that I knew were categorically incorrect based on past experiences. I’ve also encountered situations where reps really didn’t have tools at their disposal to investigate an issue properly, or were so swamped with work that they couldn’t do a good job. Shipwire has hired more reps over the years. However, this has been a Band-Aid -- Shipwire's lousy software and their outsourced warehousing model are systemically flaws. Customer service reps are never able to get ahead of the game and nothing has changed in 2.5 years that I’ve used them. The problem is made worse by the fact that Shipwire’s customers don’t have a specific account rep to go to when things get really bad. Every request goes to a new rep. If you call in to follow up on an existing case, you’ll get a different rep. These reps step all over each other, cause confusion, and make matters worse. There is no clear escalation path for serious problems; issues go from bad to worse.

Poorly packed Items – One might expect a company whose core competency is shipping to pack boxes better than you could yourself as a small or medium sized business. That’s is also not true with Shipwire. Shipwire packages are sealed with hand operated tape guns. These only provide a neat pack-job if the person operating the gun is careful. In a situation where thousands of packages need to be packed, this isn’t possible. As a result, most professional fulfillment companies use a machine that automatically measures, cuts and moistens reinforced paper tape that is then applied to the package to seal it. These machines are not expensive. I own one and used it prior to moving my fulfillment to Shipwire. Amazingly, shipwire’s warehouses don’t use these machines. Packages sent to your customer by Shipwire look sloppy and unprofessional. Shipwire packages are a poor reflection of your company and brand.

Wholesale Orders – Shipwire says that it can handle wholesale orders. This promise was one of the reasons why I wanted to use them as a vendor. Unfortunately, it is a failed promise. Wholesale customers need orders fulfilled on pallets. This is not considered a standard form of shipment at Shipwire so wholesale orders require Shipwire customers to create a “Special Project”. Creating such a project turns out to be a pain in the neck, Shipwire charges extra fees, and these projects wont get done for at least 5 business days. That’s just not acceptable. Wholesale orders should be easy to fulfill and they should go out the door within 48 hours like all other orders.

Known Service Issues – Shipwire doesn’t alert its customers to system problems when they occur. In Q4 2015, Shipwire upgraded its software without alerting customers to the change. The software upgrade failed and customers were not told about the problem for days even though Shipwire was aware of the issue. As a result, we merchants were not able to take actions that might have lessened the severity of the problem. For example, we might have been able to fulfill some of these orders from stock we have on hand in our offices. This would have been particularly helpful with Amazon orders since Amazon strictly enforces a 2-day shipping policy. As a result, many Shipwire customers including myself have had their account status at Amazon downgraded to “Poor.” Another example….. I’ve found system bugs that resulted in late shipments of orders processed with 3rd party shipping accounts. When I contacted customer support, the rep told me that he knew the system was not properly importing PDF files but Shipwire never bothered to let its customers know about this. The orders just went unfulfilled until the customer discovers them.

Bottom Line: The idea of a fulfillment service for small to medium sized businesses is a great idea. Unfortunately, the execution at Shipwire is seriously flawed. Look to others for help with your shipping needs. Shipwire will cause you financial loss, aggravation and lost customer good will. They are bad news.

"Shipwirewill ruin your business"

Worst experience ever - Stay away, they are after your money, no customer service, no dignity, another American cooperation that will do everything to take the last dollar from you.
you sign an agreement you will need to pay in gold to finish

"Minimum Monthly Account Billing policy"

They call it Minimum Monthly Account Billing Policy but it´s just a rip off. Now you are charged min. $500 per month, which is tough for small start-ups. They obviously do not honor what´s been agreed when signing up with them and just change unilaterally their terms. Shipwire sucks!

"WORST 3PL EVER! STAY AWAY"

We would love to keep this feedback brief but due to the sheer number of issues we’ve had this is impossible. Our feedback in short: STAY AWAY FROM SHIPWIRE!

If you still want to open an account with Shipwire, do yourself the favor and read our comments (dated May 2016) below so you can’t say no one has warned you.

- There is no account manager or someone who actually takes over responsibility and/or accountability EVER. You will only have an account manager UNTIL you sign the contract and start paying bills. Afterwards, you are automatically transferred to the “customer service” team. It will drive you mad, guaranteed. We’ve had numerous instances in which we left voicemails, emails, etc. without EVER hearing back. Totally rubbish!

- Not that it really matters but still good to know when comparing other 3PL options: Shipwire does NOT own any of the non-US warehouses. They simply rent space within other warehouse. For example, in the UK they work with a company called AFM and in Hong Kong all goods are stored with Kelly Logistics.

- Shipwire wants you to believe you “save shipping cost”. In fact, the contrary is true. Open your own account with logistics company and you easily save up to 50% in shipping cost. In addition, as of May 2016, the minimum cost with Shipwire is $500USD per month(!). Our suggestion: Unless you ship hundredth of orders per day, we highly recommend to rent a cheap studio (or use your own basement) to store your goods and pay a student a few bucks to handle all orders (or do it simply yourself).

- Shipwire will not provide any information and/or update upon receiving your goods in their warehouse. No update whatsoever! You will only be notified once all boxes have been counted, etc.. But don’t expect a simple message like: "Hey, we got your shipment. We'll get back to you shortly."

- If you are based in Europe be aware: Shipwire only has literally only 1(!!!) customer rep. So if you call them between 8am and 3pm London time with an urgent issue and the rep is on the phone with someone else you will simply have to wait. It has happened numerous times to us that we had to wait for more than 30 minutes listening to their terrible music. It has also happened that the rep’s excuse was: “Sorry, I was at lunch”.

- If you have an issues and you “open a case” do not expect a quick solution. We've had endless cases. There is no overview as to which cases are still open, what the status is, etc. It’s an absolute mess!

- Do you want to visit one of their warehouses to check what is looks like and how your goods are stored? Nope, not allowed. In addition, Shipwire will refuse to provide the name of a contact person and a contact phone number of any of their warehouses. (Shipwire will only provide their main US office phone number which is useless when your carrier has urgent questions).

- Are you selling a somewhat “pricey item” and do you want to make sure that even the packaging and filling material looks nice? Forget about Shipwire: The filling material is ugly, boxes are cheap and prepared with zero love. Every looks like a horrible McDonalds burger and you wonder why it does not look like the picture above the counter.

- VERY BIG POINT: Shipwire’s marketing brochures make you believe it’s very easy to use all of their warehouses across the globe. What you need to know is that you need to SET UP A COMPANY in every country in which you want to use their warehouse! Yes, let's repeat, if you only have - for example - a UK-based company, you need to incorporate in the US and in Hong Kong to even be able to use their warehouses in the US and HongKong. Yep, that’s right. And none of the shiny marketing videos will tell you this important detail.

- Totally weird email handling: In most cases, Shipwire won’t include your previous email when they respond to one of your emails. Yes, that’s right, believe it or not. Any normal email conversation consist of an “email thread”. Shipwire does not have that(!!!). So if you wonder what their email refers to you will have to go through your “sent folder” and figure out what you wrote.

- Do you like to quickly send a box to an Amazon warehouse? Be aware that it will easily take 7-10 business days for Shipwire to prepare and ship that box. Yes(!), a task that would personally take you less than an hour to accomplish will take them more than a week.

We have no idea how anyone could possibly leave an honest 5-star review for this terrible company. Giving our horrible experience with Shipwire we start to believe those 5-star reviews are fake. Feel free to contact us via email and we will give you free advice on how to avoid this lengthly, painful and costly logistics adventure called Shipwire. We will also happily supply you with a long list of alternative 3PL companies in the US, UK and Asia.

GOODBYE SHIPWIRE, WE ARE OUT!

PS: Check tweets about Shipwire on Twitter. Not their own account (which only consists of marketing rubbish) but read actual tweets from users. A large majority is negative, no wonder why…

PPS: Dear Shipwire rep responsible for responding to our posts: We have no idea who you are so don’t even dare to respond to this review by saying “We are sorry”. Take care of your clients in a proper manner so companies don’t have to write reviews like this. Be ashamed of the company you work for!

"Absolutely fantastic service"

I can't recommend Shipwire enough, and I owe particular thanks and gratitude to Julie, Mark and Asad (in the fantastic Accounts and Support team). From the initial account setup to follow-up support, I've been delighted by their professionalism, kind and friendly attitudes, and the fact that they continuously handle my complicated inventory requests and set up questions with genuine care and punctuality. They truly go above and beyond their roles, and their help was crucial to our success as a business in the early stages of being online. Thank you so much for all that you do, and we look forward to continuing this partnership.

"Logistics is tough, Shipwire is easy. Dave is your hero!"

Logistics is a tough thing to handle and Shipwire does a great job making it accessible to Mid to Small companies, ie, companies without their own infrastructure. Their system has allowed us to reach around the world to deliver our product to places that were previously not easy to reach. Before we used Shipwire, we used independent warehouses around the world and it was less then effective for several reasons. Having all of your warehouses (world wide) in 1 "place" is a major breakthrough, wether you realize it or not. Their customer team is friendly, listens and really does strive to solve any issues you have. In particular, David Valera, stands out as a hero for us. He has helped me and my brand through a lot of serious issues and growing pains. He clarified the situations, so we could understand what was happening, helped develop our solution and put the pedal down, on his side, to implement what was needed. No company is without their problems and struggles. Shipwire has them. However, when it hit's the fan, they do what it takes to get it straight.

"First time an issue is solved promptly and with the best customer service ever experienced in 3 years with Shipwire."

Working with Nora was a true pleasure. I had always felt Shipwire was a good fulfillment alternative when dealing with issues online and a terrible one when reaching out to customer service representatives. Nora changed this view. She was not only polite but took prompt action to solve an issue that had occurred several times and no one else had been able to resolve.
Thanks again Nora!

"Five Star service"

Richard has provided excellent customer service to us. He has been very helpful with setting up the new Basis product as well as answering all our questions when needed. Thanks Richard!

Dave and Anita