ShipMonkReviews of shipmonk.com

Not a Good Partner I researched 18 different 3PL partners for my latest venture. It had been about 4 years since I had to pick one. Having moved 110 tons of freight to 18,000 locations in 8 months with my last shipping partner, I had a pretty good sense of what I needed. ShipMonk promised me everything I was looking for, but beware, the sales process is deceptive and disconnected from the reality of operations. I was promised a number of things related to eco friendly packages and cut off times. All of which mysteriously disappeared after onboarding. I had decided to leave and initiated the process. When I did that, I was promised a discount on the picking fees for getting my inventory out. The process took 3 months during which time I was continually charged fees. The process by which one closes an account also mysteriously changed during the time I attempted to do this. It became very difficult to leave. Once I had my inventory out, they did not want to honor the discount unless I signed an onerous “separation agreement” which was evidently required to leave. I called a lawyer who called foul on this and said we were still bound by the original agreement and that they couldn’t force a signature and a gag order. With so many options available out there, I’d steer clear of ShipMonk. Something isn’t right with this company as they are always on the lookout for ShipMonk and not willing to be a good collaborative partner. I’m sure I’ll get a canned response here saying something like we’d like to work this out and I’m sorry for your trouble. I’ll believe it’s sincere if a VP or higher actually picks up a phone and reaches out with real power to collaborate. UPDATE ON 7/21/22: On 6/30/22, I received an email stating my account was officially closed and I would be getting a check back for the balance. I received the check. Today, I received a message saying they processed my "disposal" order and it was ready for pickup. If I didn't pick it up I would be charged $20/day for storage. First, according to their words, it's a disposal order so why isn't just being disposed of. Second, the account was confirmed closed and my balance refunded. Steer clear of this company. They are just plain incompetent.

I'm copying and pasting the Shipmonk values from their website: Our Values We help companies STRESS LESS and GROW MORE We are TRANSPARENT We prioritize GROWTH We are SERVICE ORIENTED We champion NEW TECHNOLOGY We PROMOTE DIVERSITY We are MULTINATIONAL We are YOUR PARTNER THROUGH THICK AND THIN We GET $H!T DONE As it is, the amount of time, and Stress I have spent over the last 3 months just to get a shipment of 110 boxes packed and prepared for shipping greatly outweighs the time I would have spent doing it myself. There was a lack of Transparency that this was going to be the case, my company is imploding, not Growing, I have not received the Services I signed up for, whatever New Technology you're using, it's not working, I don't care about the gender or color or Diversity of the people I'm working with, I care about the results, Shipmonk has been an absolute disaster for my business, not a Partner and $H!T is Not Getting Done. I began speaking with a salesperson in February about having Shipmonk take over my Cratejoy-hosted subscription box. I was told this would not be a problem and was quoted shipping rates that were comparable to the ones I was already having. I thought this was going to be great and that it would streamline the shipping of my 501 (c) (3) nonprofit subscription box. All of my products arrived at Shipmonk in Pennsylvania at least 10 days before the shipment was supposed to go out: June 1st. Then the problems started. Products that arrived were not showing up in my inventory. The June 1st ship deadline passed with one of the items; my branded boxes being "lost". The tracking info shows that these boxes arrived at Shipmonk May 6th but were not "found" until over a month later. I have angry subscribers and my boxes have missed both the June and July ship dates. Still no idea when they will be shipped. The current shippings rates I’ve been quoted are nearly triple what the salesperson quoted me. This is not workable for my nonprofit. If I had known any of this, I would have stayed far away from Shipmonk. The integration with Cratejoy is not seamless and shipping is confusing. My account is being drained constantly with hidden fees and 4 of my subscription boxes went missing over the weekend. No one knows what happened to them! They are worth $119 and I was told I'd get a $10 reimbursement for each. Horrible experience, I have warned two colleagues in the subscription box industry to stay away from Shipmonk when they asked me my experience. Update: September 1 2022: 20 boxes that were supposed to be shipped mid-August never reached the customers and never left the warehouse. This is a nightmare, I wish I had never heard of this company because of the amount of time I have wasted with them and grief they have caused my customers that I worked so hard to get.

After trying to work things out with Shipmonk for months I felt compelled to write another review. The service has only gotten worse with time. They are currently shipping 1 wholesale order per day- I have been back and forth with the head of the PA operations team “c” for nearly 3 weeks trying to get one order out the door. If you care about your business or you're reputation, avoid this 3PL at all costs. Example: on 6/30 they allowed over 8k worth of inventory to leave the warehouse without a scan. It is now missing and has been for days over 8k worth of goods. I wouldn't trust them with a slice of toast. I doubt I'll ever see my money from these crooks.

We removed all our stock from Shipmonk after we discover massive storage overcharging. They can hold 23 of our products in a Medium size bin and when we checked they where charging us for XL size bins for 80% of our SKUs when we had less than 23 units in their warehouse. Their reply was we place your products where we want but not in one bin so they could in theory put 1 unit in each XL bin and charge you for each bin. They refused to correct the issue and continue overcharging on storage for 80% of our products at an overcharge of 70% storage fees. To file in Broward County in FL to recoup their over charging would cost more than the storage fee, and they know that so good bye all that money. We have been on Ebay for 10 years with a perfect 100% feedback and now we have lost our top seller rating because of late shipping. On Amazon our late shipping rate went up to 16% and Amazon threatened to deactivate our account. Our sales on Amazon increased by 230% once we moved our stock out of Shipmonk and back into FBA. The Happiness Engineers ignore your emails and phone calls. They are an oxymoron. To get your stock out of Shipmonk after you place your closing order which is at full fulfillment rate is ignored for weeks so they can milk you for more over charged storage fees. I have all this documented so any reply to this complaint cannot solve any issues. Be very careful. Do not sign the agreement as it is very loose in their favor and once you are in the hole, it will take a lot of money to dig your way out.

I've spent hundreds of thousands with ShipMonk -- let me spare you from further research: Avoid them like the plague. First onboarded with ShipMonk in mid-2020. For the first 5 months, it was a great experience. From there, everything went sideways as we scaled with them. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of our experience, I'll summarize the pros & cons of their service: PROS - 1: Great software 2: Multiple warehouse locations 3: Nice, well-meaning people CONS - 1: The "Happiness Engineers": One of ShipMonk's selling points is being assigned a rep. Unfortunately, our experience with our rep was like talking to a wall every time problems arose. They are slow at execution and due to the bottleneck structure of ShipMonk, they often don't have the ability to resolve problems fast & effectively. 2: Stolen Products: In early 2021, we saw a trend of customers reporting empty boxes, which led us to believe people were stealing products at their warehouse. Instead of inspecting & resolving the issue, ShipMonk's proposal was to have a secure facility in which 1 person could only access it. Unfortunately, this didn't change a single thing. This issue was and still never fully resolved. 3: Mispicks: Customers receiving completely different products than they purchased. Human error is understandable, but the rate at which it occurred at ShipMonk was unacceptable. 4: Overpriced Shipping Fees: This is where ShipMonk makes the bulk of their profit, and where they pry on other merchants who may not know they can get a better deal. We've seen upwards of 50% cut in shipping fees by using smaller 3PL solutions. For example -- DHL Express to Singapore would be approx $40, but $20 with our new 3PL solution. 5: Inability To Resolve Problems: This is the biggest one for me. We had multiple meetings with head managers at ShipMonk who were keen on trying to resolve our issues. It never lead to any significant improvements. This company has serious logistical challenges internally. Based on my experience spending a lot with ShipMonk, I would not consider it a reliable 3PL.

I've been using ShipMonk for the past 6 months and it has not lived up to our expectations at all. The only positive point I would really give is on the ShipMonk dashboard -- it is fairly intuitive to use and works as was promised in the demo. However, most other interactions have left us with a sour taste in our mouth. The biggest nightmares I've experienced have come with ShipMonk's fulfillment accuracy and their ability to course-correct when mistakes are made. I had a wholesale customer who received the wrong order because a ShipMonk floor worker swapped shipping labels -- instead of the order my wholesale customer ordered, they received another ShipMonk account's order, while their actual original order was shipped to that ShipMonk account. I only found out about this after being contacted by the other ShipMonk account. While I can understand that human error occurs from time to time, to make matters worse ShipMonk was extremely slow to FIX the error despite this being a problem that impacted two of their accounts (not to mention it was extremely embarrassing to have to explain this to our customer). It took a course of over two weeks of me constantly emailing and calling ShipMonk to get the matter fixed -- I'm honestly not sure how long it would have taken if I didn't reach out constantly, as they have a habit of being radio silent over email. You can expect a response usually well past 24 hours on average. I had another wholesale order that was incorrect two times in a row. The original order came incorrect to my customer, and my customer let me know. I then re-submitted the remaining portion of the order that was incorrect, and guess what -- that follow-up order also still came with incorrect items. It took 3 tries to send a wholesale order to get it correct. It was an awful experience and the only excuse ShipMonk makes is "human error" from time to time. Well perhaps ShipMonk should spend a bit more time training their floor workers, or perhaps pay them better, and at the same time hire some more staff to manage accounts because most of them take their sweet time to respond to you. The CEO shared a report that they had 98% order accuracy at the end of last year. I'm not sure how they measured this metric, because that's far from the accuracy of what we've actually been provided. Also, don't bother with any requests for analytics or even a simple report of how much you've been billed for receiving or inventory costs, you can expect those to take over 2 weeks at least. Again, the only positive note I can give them is on their dashboard but the customer service is beyond disappointing. Update: Since this review, ShipMonk has also lost part of my inventory. The worst part of this experience however was inquiring for 2 weeks about a status update on this inventory and not getting a single response from ShipMonk until we started calling them incessantly. They wasted our time and our customers' time waiting on orders to come in. We're not planning on renewing our services with ShipMonk. Don't be fooled by their seemingly low prices as the hidden fees as well as the worst customer experience I've ever had makes me question who is running the processes behind this company. To say we are disappointed is an understatement.

Where to start. Our inventory had been shipped to Shipmonk without SKUs, which is entirely OUR fault. Shipmonk would need to create a special project to separate our goods. We sent them a detailed spreadsheet showing which pieces have which SKU. This was sent to our account manager on a Tuesday. By Thursday he told us this project would be completed by the weekend and we were good to go to launch our store. We opened on Saturday with several sales. On Monday our account dashboard still showed no stock so I called Shipmonk. Not only had our spreadsheet not been sent to the warehouse, the special project had not even been started. Completely contrary to the promise that it would have been finished two days previously. Our account manager was on vacation and the person covering assured us the project would be underway straight away. On Tuesday, three days after getting our first sales, there is still no inventory showing. I called and discovered that the project had still not been started and would probably take several days to complete. At this point I had lost all confidence in Shipmonk and asked them to stop the receiving project and we’d arrange collection of our goods. Some inventory did then show – one box of dresses and two boxes of trousers had been unpacked. The special project fee for this was over $300. If we had continued to let our goods be unpacked the project fee would have been in excess of $3000! This all happened in March 2021. It is now November and they still have our dresses and trousers. It seems Shipmonk requires customers to sign a closing contract, one clause of which, is to not leave any disparaging reviews of them. I have never in my life been asked to sign a contract to end a relationship, let alone one that stops customers from reporting the truth. For the past six months we have been emailing back and forth trying to get our goods released. They finally relented on charging us storage fees (apparently they kept the trousers and dresses in their fulfilment storage areas all this time – not at our request), but still insist on us signing a contract. At the risk of losing our goods we need to warn people not to deal with this company. We noticed several other issues that would have caused problems had we actually used their service. As part of our product receiving we supplied weights and sizes for our pieces for shipment fee calculation. On our shipmonk dashboard many of our pieces were showing as double the postage price that we calculated using Shipmonk’s sales pack that contains their zones and rates. When I queried this it seems they use something called volume weight which is not mentioned in the sales brochures and would have doubled the postage cost for several of our pieces. We currently use USPS and pay less than what we had originally expected to pay with Shipmonk. This is nothing more than hidden fees, which is a common theme if you read other customer’s reviews. This is just a snapshot of the nightmare we’ve had with this company. There are far far better alternatives out there. Use them. Lastly, back in Spring Shipmonk's reviews were pretty bad. Since then there has a been a flurry of short 5 * reviews. Read into that what you will :)

This company will drive you out of business. Their error rate is hovering around 50/50 for us, nothing seems to ever go through without a complication. Since we set up with them about a year ago, we've had them mis label products several times, over send out orders (one time they sent out 500 pcs instead of...5). Send boxes of inventory to random people. Mis count our inventory. The list goes on and on. I regret the day we setup and can't wait to get our inventory out of there.