If you’re a startup founder, run an ecommerce store (here’s how to set one up), or just completed a successful crowdfunding campaign, you might be looking into different order fulfillment services to make the process of shipping out orders much more simple.
Fulfillment companies aren’t right for everyone. If you’re just starting out, handling fulfillment yourself or hiring someone to help you can save money in the short-term. But, handling fulfillment yourself can be a nightmare if you’re growing at a fast rate. Fulfillment companies help by offering a wide range of services, including storing and shipping your inventory for you, returns processing, and customer service to solve any issues that run into.
In this post, I’m going to review two popular fulfillment services: Fulfillrite and Shipwire. Keep reading to learn more about their features, pricing, and what their customers are saying, so you can choose the best fulfillment option for your unique needs. As a disclosure, Fulfillrite is a sponsor of our podcast.
Fulfillrite
Fulfillrite has helped clients in different industries streamline their ecommerce order fulfillment since 2009. They specialize in ecommerce order fulfillment for: crowdfunding, ecommerce, pre-sales, tech and electronics, apparel, and more. Fulfillrite offers their customers “fast shipping and competitive pricing, with no hidden fees or surprises.” In our experience, the team is also very personal and passionate about what they do.
Fulfillrite also has many partners, which means that you can easily integrate their order fulfillment services with your preferred shopping cart. A few of these partners include Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Amazon, Celery, BackerKit, eBay, and Paypal.
Services: ecommerce order fulfillment, inventory storage, order fulfillment, kitting, bagging, and labeling, returns processing.
Price: Due to the range of services that Fulfillrite offers, exact pricing is not listed on their website. You can request a quote here by filling out some basic information about yourself and your business, like your current shopping cart solution, storage space you need, monthly order volume, number of unique products (SKUs) you have, and whether or not you ship internationally.
Reviews
Almost all online customer reviews that we’ve found for Fulfillrite are positive. In a review on TrustPilot, Christopher Odell shared some of the things that he liked about Fulfillrite:
“They make other fulfillment houses I have dealt with look like they are living in the dark ages, the software they use is just that much better and they don’t charge nearly as much as some of the competition.
They also make the billing really clear which is nice, I never wondered what I was being charged for and again with other companies it has been total madness with their multi page invoices with little charges for all sorts of things.
Overall they have a great system and they really care about their customers. I recommend everyone that is considering fulfillment to save yourselves some trouble and just start here.”
Another satisfied Fulfillrite user who uses Shopify for ecommerce left a review, sharing how they started out with Shipwire and ended up happy users of Fulfillrite:
“I’m an ex-Shipwire customer, we used them for 6 months. They started out great, my sales rep lured me in with personal attention and quick responses. Things ran relatively smoothly till they shipped out our first order. We had shipped them marketing inserts, they didn’t include them with any of our first 500 orders. So I contacted customer support to fix the issue and they refused to fix it, they also stopped talking to me. So I emailed my old sales rep, he stopped reading my emails. Their customer service team is garbage.
All of this to say that Fulfillrite has been a breath of fresh air. Their website feels a little older in the graphic design department, but it works great. Their customer service is great. Joe spent time on the phone explaining the shipping process and even helped us by finding a new freight forwarding partner.
Ok so that’s all cool, but what about pricing, compared to Shipwire, Fulfillrites prices are amazing. They work with you to find the best prices, packaging and speed for your product. I’ll update this if they start screwing things up, but I really doubt they will. We’re looking forward to having a great long term partner.”
Looking through reviews of Fulfillrite, I can’t find a bad one which I think says a lot. Larger fulfillment services may seem alluring with their promises and long list of features, but sometimes the smaller fulfillment centers can give you all of the efficiency and simplicity you need.
Shipwire
The Shipwire team has been dedicated to bringing businesses of all sizes simple and scalable order fulfillment solutions since 2007. Their website says that clients can save up to 35% on domestic shipping and 75% on international shipping.
Shipwire integrates with just about any ecommerce shopping cart that you can think of, including popular ones like BigCommerce, Celery, Etsy, Paypal, Shopify, WooCommerce, 3dcart, and others.
Services: product storage, automated order submission with real time shipping rates and inventory status, fast and flexible shipping, automated carrier and packaging selection, operations management and analysis tools, distribution partnerships, returns processing, and a dedicated support team
Price: The price that Shipwire charges is a combination of a $64.95 monthly fee, along with a per order fee that is determined by your sales, amount of unique products and storage space you need, and how many of their warehouse locations you will want to use. You can estimate your Shipwire costs by filling out this information here.
Reviews
We’ve found Shipwire reviews to be a lot more mixed, though this is common of large companies. One happy customer who left a review on TrustPilot shared:
“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.”
On the other hand, it is not hard to find bad reviews of Shipwire. While there are many good ones, a lot of customers have had problems with lost and potentially stolen inventory, along with what sounds like terrible customer service. One customer who left a Yelp review shared:
“A nightmare of a company to use for shipping. Probably the worst policies and customer service I have ever encountered in any industry. They claim you can leave at any time but their broken system, non-existent customer service, and ridiculous pick fee system makes leaving a long and costly process. After two months of phone calls and emails and hundreds of dollars later, I am out. Never again. They have a Better Business Bureau score of F and it is well deserved!!!!”
You see this type of thing a lot with businesses that have great ideas, but run into trouble scaling their operations. Many customers do have good experiences, but due to issues with answering all requests in a timely manner some problems don’t get dealt with properly. This leaves another set of customers with terrible experiences and potential customers confused about whether or not Shipwire is trustworthy. However, at the end of the day, negative customer experiences are far more likely to be reported online than positive ones.
Conclusion
Both of these fulfillment companies have been around for a while now and are partnered with leading ecommerce shopping carts. They offer services that make shipping orders much easier, giving you the opportunity to save time and money.
From my research, it seems like in a match between Fulfillrite and Shipwire, Fulfillrite would win, mainly due to customer service. They might be a bit smaller of an operation, but they have proven time and time again that they will go the extra mile for their customers to find solutions that work.
While some of Shipwire’s customers report positive experiences, many of them have lost money and run into issues that ultimately caused them to leave that fulfillment service. Especially as a new business, I’m not sure that I would want to risk being one of the customers forced to suffer through lost inventory and mediocre customer service.
If you want to see a comparison of the different fulfillment centers that are out there, check out this article.
We invite you to leave a review via comment of your experience using these two companies, or others!
