ShipHero – A Clearinity Review

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All Clearinity Review blogs are industry-specific for ecommerce sellers. These apps may be better or worse in other industries! You may run into nomenclature you’re not familiar with, and you’ll want to reference the Glossary here (constantly updated).

The Clearinity Review Format

  • Wildcards are unique facts about the company that set it apart in the industry and carry no judgement.

  • Rough diamonds are things that could be improved. This category carries no positive/negative judgement – it just needs work!

  • Bad notes are actively hurting ecommerce companies.

  • Good notes are actively helping the ecommerce industry by encouraging good best-practices or helping in some other way.

  • Final Thoughts are a long-form discussion on the company, it’s future, and overall impact on the industry.

ShipHero

WILDCARDS

  • A US Company, run a British guy who like scotch.

  • Unique perspective on 3PLs

ROUGH DIAMONDS

  • Reporting Suite – Reporting used to be slow and painful, but ShipHero already fixed that with a queueing engine and other smart upgrades. By exposing more data and analytics to their reporting engine, ShipHero could position itself as a leader in the field.

  • Accounting Integrations – Xero is a supported accounting integration, but expansion to QuickBooks Online would reinforce ShipHero’s commitment to good accounting.

BAD

  • Assembly/Bundling/Kitting – ShipHero doesn’t really tout itself as supporting assemblies (where one manufactures things), but I’ve seen clients try it. It’s messy and hard to follow, even for a company that only does kitting/bundling.

GOOD

  • Unrivaled 3PL Marketplace – ShipHero understands what a pain it is to involve a 3PL in your operations, even if it’s saving you time and money. The ShipHero 3PL Marketplace solves two problem:

    • A) You don’t have to spend time vetting your own 3PL and

    • B) You won’t have to spend USD$5,000+ to get your 3PL integrated to your inventory platform.

  • Streamlined Platform – ShipHero keeps the architecture relatively simple, meaning that it’s fast and allows them to iterate quickly.

  • Workflow Automation – The team at ShipHero is all about saving you time in your daily warehouse operations. They really get what it takes to make a warehouse run well!

FINAL THOUGHTS

When you go on the ShipHero website, you’ll get the sense that they are just for managing your warehouse. That’s where they started, and that may be how they market it, but they have all the pieces that classify them as a true Cloud Inventory and not just a WMS. Plus, we’ve seen it in action with clients, and it’s robust enough to consider it a Cloud Inventory product!

ShipHero is all about a slow-growth, value-add development cycle – hence why they recognized and capitalized on the 3PL problem! This also means that they’ve laid the groundwork to compete with the bigger fish.

ShipHero still has a lot of growing to do (in terms of how much software they plan to develop), as well as a lot of internal questions to answer (Are we actually cloud inventory, or are we just going to corner this 3PL Marketplace concept?). Importantly, the pieces in place now mean that ShipHero is the perfect answer for some businesses, but not all of them! This is why we stand by our 7/10 “Bang for the Buck” score, with the 3rd-highest rating of all Clearinity Ecommerce Apps.

Here’s to a happy 3PL and warehouse environment!