We’ve been using Shipmonk for a year and half now and it has honestly been the most painful part of running a business. We thought that outsourcing fulfillment to them would make our e-commerce & wholesale business easier to run, but it has been nothing short of a nightmare at every turn. Shipmonk has good software systems, but really really bad processes, and the worst customer service (worse than calling your cable or phone company).
Some examples: They lose inventory upon receiving, because they don’t check what they sign for when product is delivered to them vs. what they actually receive and enter into the system. So when shipments show as delivered but the inventory is missing from the warehouse, their excuse is that they receive too many shipments to possibly try to check what was actually received. They have literally, on multiple occasions, lost thousands of dollars of inventory, and even when escalated to the CEO, refuse to accept ownership of this or do anything about it. And because they signed the delivery slip, you can no longer claim for a lost package from the shipper.
They have extremely poor customer service – they literally do not care or do anything to fix it when they make mistakes, they make the same mistakes again and again, and have no escalation path. There is literally no one even at the highest levels that will address their process issues or the huge costly mistakes they constantly make. You can email the CEO and he couldn’t care less.
They are ok with direct to consumer but absolutely horrible with wholesale. It takes 1 week+ to provide shipping quotes for wholesale orders, and you have to check on them constantly to make sure wholesale orders actually go out. They will change the order status to “shipped”, and then never provide a tracking number, so you have to remember to go back and review all of your orders to ensure they actually went out. They send international orders using shipping methods that get sent back by customs, they package products in a way where they get damaged easily, and are bad with any kind of non-standard ask.
While some businesses are very customer service oriented, Shipmonk is at the opposite spectrum. Calling their agents “happiness engineers” is a literal farce.
If you think running a business is hard, try running one using Shipmonk. If I can give advice to anyone looking for a fulfillment center, it would be to avoid Shipmonk, and ask other services really detailed questions about how they handle issues.
I would give Shipmonk negative stars if I could, and ask for the weeks of my life back, that were spent agonizing over all the problems they’ve caused that have been ludicrous or impossible to fix.
In the end you just throw your hands up and say, well I guess they’ve lost a few thousand dollars of inventory again and won’t do anything about it, and just move on for the sake of your own sanity, rather than engaging in another pointless conversation with an enragingly unhelpful agent or executive at Shipmonk.