We've been using metapack despatch manager for 4 months now and think it's well worth a look for anyone wanting to streamline their despatch.
They integrate with most carrier, we use parcelforce and royal mail.
We take the data feed from a sage file which works great for us as we have other sales feeds that go into sage. Mole end also have a system that intergrates actinic directly to metapack but i've no knoweldge of how well that works.
It automatically choose the correct service based on parcel weight / insurance value / delivery speed option / country.
We use the pence of the shipping price to indicate the delivery option - shipping price ending in a 6 is our fastest service, ending in 3 is an economy service, highland / islands have their own codes as do european countries and then the rest of the world.
We can now despatch orders much quicker as the packing staff don't need to think about the best service to use, weights are taken direct from sage so no weighing (we monitored the total despatch weight for a while and applied a correction factor to allow for packaging). All the packing staff need to do is put the parcel in the right collection area.
Cost wise, our shipping costs are the same as last year although as we can now offer more shipping services our income from shipping is up almost 50%.
Customers get a tracking email so less phone calls and their tracking system can search on postcode, name etc so quick and easy.
They integrate with most carrier, we use parcelforce and royal mail.
We take the data feed from a sage file which works great for us as we have other sales feeds that go into sage. Mole end also have a system that intergrates actinic directly to metapack but i've no knoweldge of how well that works.
It automatically choose the correct service based on parcel weight / insurance value / delivery speed option / country.
We use the pence of the shipping price to indicate the delivery option - shipping price ending in a 6 is our fastest service, ending in 3 is an economy service, highland / islands have their own codes as do european countries and then the rest of the world.
We can now despatch orders much quicker as the packing staff don't need to think about the best service to use, weights are taken direct from sage so no weighing (we monitored the total despatch weight for a while and applied a correction factor to allow for packaging). All the packing staff need to do is put the parcel in the right collection area.
Cost wise, our shipping costs are the same as last year although as we can now offer more shipping services our income from shipping is up almost 50%.
Customers get a tracking email so less phone calls and their tracking system can search on postcode, name etc so quick and easy.
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