Multi-Storefront & ShipStation

Katie Hoesley, Senior Developer Advocate at Big Commerce, sat down with Jim Gagliardi, Chief Product Officer at ShipStation, to discuss ShipStation’s experience with Multi-Storefront.

Who is ShipStation?

ShipStation makes shipping faster, easier and more affordable for ecommerce businesses. They power shipments of all sizes, provide you with shipping updates, and get your products to your customers fast!

They provide intuitive dashboards to help make your shopping experience easy and successful, automate nearly every step in the shipping process, allow you to batch print hundreds of shipping labels with just a few clicks, and so much more.

To learn more about ShipStation, check out their website or our documentation about ShipStation at BigCommerce!

The Interview: MSF & ShipStation

Is your app currently designated as Multi-Storefront compatible &/or optimized?

Yes our app is compatible with MSF

Why did you update your apps to be MSF compatible &/or optimized? ○ How was that process?

We were very excited when BigCommerce reached out to us to participate in their MSF launch. It’s a great new feature that members of our team have experienced on the GAP/OldNavy/Banana Republic website. As our merchants grow with ShipStation, they evolve and start developing different product lines or brands, while still wanting the ease and efficiency of one login and one centralized operations dashboard for their customers.

How much time did it take?

3 weeks.

How high was the barrier to entry/how much lift was needed?

BigCommerce’s documentation around this made the lift easy, and we clearly understood what was required. Their workflow fit seamlessly into ShipStation, so it was more about fine tuning and making sure the customer experience was of high quality.

What/who was your main avenue for support in optimizing? Partner Manager, Partner Support, etc?

Partner Managers! BigCommerce’s GM Matt Crawford, and Strategic Partner Manager, Ashley Watson, were incredibly helpful when it came to putting us in contact with the correct people and also answering a lot of questions themselves with the fastest response times. Thank you to Jenn Hunt and Sarah Hruby, ShipStation partner managers who helped facilitate this.

How has that affected your app’s performance?

We believe our integration with BigCommerce that support MSF now offers a superior feature where it’s also possible for our merchants to use automations around their different channels. This has resulted in optimizing efficiency on our platform.

Do you have any clients using MSF?

Yes, we have a number of clients using MSF and loving it!

Were you asked by clients to update to support MSF?

Pre-launch once communication from BigCommerce was sent to merchants, we were asked by a small number of clients to update to support MSF

Has this affected your app’s ease of use?

This has not affected the app’s ease of use: in fact, this has added more robustness and allowed for advanced automations, based on the storefront. Users are also able to quickly identify which orders are coming from which storefront, and have a better grasp of how each of their storefronts is performing.

Were there any issues that arose?

We have found that BigCommerce users are confused as to whether they have a true MSF account/store or if they have multiple separate stores linked to one BigCommerce account. We had to update our internal documentation for support where they first have to understand which scenario it is.

If the merchant has multiple stores under one account they believe they have MSF and in result think they only need to connect one store. This results in a number of support requests as the merchant doesn’t understand why some of their orders are missing. This is resolved by connecting their BigCommerce stores separately one by one to ShipStation as they do not have the true MSF functionality.

Have you gotten any positive or negative feedback since updating?

We have received a lot of positive feedback from the merchants that have used the new feature and functionality. Our merchants are excited that they only have to go through the connection process once and are able to import orders in from their multiple store fronts.

Want to Learn More?

If you’re interested in Multi-Storefront and want to learn more, check out our documentation here.

We’d love to hear from you! Comment your thoughts and questions below, or tweet at us @BigCommerceDevs!