ShipRush vs ShipStation: Order Fulfilment Software Comparison

Order fulfilment and inventory management are two of the key processes that you need to think about carefully as your ecommerce business grows.

Choosing comprehensive software that can easily scale alongside you is essential — but where do you start? Most cloud-based shipping software looks great from the outside, but the ongoing monthly costs, hidden fees, and lack of advanced features can all get in the way of taking your retail empire to greater heights.

And let’s not even get started on having to completely switch software when you realize you’ve made the wrong choice. Yeesh!

To guide you in the decision-making process, we’re taking a look at the pros and cons of two popular shipping software solutions — ShipRush and ShipStation.

We’ll also take a look at Veeqo’s free shipping and inventory management software, and show you how it could be an even better solution to help grow your ecommerce business.

Table of contents

• ShipRush Overview

• Key Features of ShipRush

• ShipRush Pros & Cons

• ShipStation Overview

• Key Features of ShipStation

• ShipStation Pros & Cons

• Veeqo: a better alternative to ShipRush and ShipStation?

ShipRush overview

ShipRush is a cloud-based, multi-carrier shipping solution that’s designed to help small to medium-sized ecommerce businesses streamline their order fulfilment process.

By bringing sales details, carrier pricing, label printing, and customer delivery information into a centralized dashboard, sellers can more easily manage their day-to-day operations, ship faster, and improve the customer experience.

Key features of ShipRush

• Real-time rate shopping

• Label printing

• Integrations with leading carriers and marketplaces

• API and developer tools

• Branded experiences

Order management

Speeding up the end-to-end shipping process is what ShipRush does best, if you hadn’t guessed by the name!

This software makes your ecommerce order management more efficient, with a bunch of handy features for busy sellers. Workflow automations can be set up to take care of a lot of your repetitive tasks, and a central dashboard gives you a centralized view of orders, carrier pricing, and delivery details.

For a personal touch, you can also create custom emails, packing slips, and branded tracking pages to increase awareness about your company.

Real-time rate shopping lets you easily pick the best available carrier rates for each package, while enjoying discounted shipping. You can either use your own negotiated carrier rates, or take advantage of ShipRush's pre-negotiated rates with UPS, FedEx, and USPS.

Inventory management

ShipRush was primarily built to streamline order management and shipping for ecommerce sellers, so it doesn’t offer much in the way of inventory management features. 

If you’re scaling and need robust inventory and warehouse management tools, you’ll need to connect to their separate ecommerce WMS, Peoplevox, which comes with an enterprise-sized price tag.

Carrier Integrations

Major carriers like UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL, all integrate natively with ShipRush. This lets you quickly compare shipping rates and get the benefits of discounted carrier pricing.

There are also built-in automations to reduce some of your time-consuming admin tasks like weighing packages, choosing services, and selecting packaging.

Marketplace Integrations

ShipRush partners with over 90 web stores and ecommerce marketplaces. It integrates directly with many leading tools for accounting and warehousing, CRMs, ERPs, and payments, as well as 3PL services to help you develop smoother operational processes.

If you need extra integrations, there are also API and white label capabilities available to sync up your existing apps and systems.

ShipRush plans and pricing

If you’re a smaller business, ShipRush offers a free plan with basic features that lets you send up to 50 packages each month.

For medium and enterprise sellers that need more features and have higher shipping volumes, there are two paid plan tiers*, as well as a custom developer/OEM plan. 

• Speedy plan – $29.95 per month for 3 users

• Warehouse plan – $99.95 a month for 3 users, with additional features including LTL add-on options and a SQL/MySQL web store

There’s a 60-day free trial on both of the standard tiers, so you can get a feel for the software and its capabilities. It’s worth noting that if you use the USPS ground advantage service with these plans, you’ll pay an extra charge of $0.20 per label.

As we mentioned earlier, ShipRush doesn’t have any robust native inventory features or real-time inventory management.

If warehousing and inventory features are essential for your growing ecommerce business, you’ll need to factor in third-party setup* costs.

Fees are between $9,600 and $32,000 for the initial setup with ShipRush’s WMS provider, with ongoing monthly plan fees starting at $2,050.

*Pricing last accessed May 2024

Pros of ShipRush

Customers leave mostly positive reviews about ShipRush, with users loving “how easy it is to send return labels and print out outbound labels” as well as the fact it “quickly and accurately calculates shipping rates” and that it’s “easy to learn and easy to maintain, with good customer service.”

Cons of ShipRush

On the flip side, several customers mention problems with ShipRush’s carrier programs, such as getting double charged when there are internal carrier changes, and having difficulties processing claims with carriers when items get lost or damaged. One user mentions that they “have a lot of problems with their “cloud” and printing…when it detaches itself from your network it creates a lot of havoc and takes 15-30 minutes to get it back online.”

ShipStation overview

ShipStation is a popular shipping software owned by Auctane. It’s available for ecommerce sellers operating in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France, and Germany.

If you need to manage sales coming in from multiple stores and marketplaces, print labels, ship orders online, and track deliveries, ShipStation has you covered. It offers more native features than ShipRush (such as inventory management tools), but this extra functionality comes at a higher monthly price.

Despite the claims that it’s an ideal solution for all ecommerce sellers, the monthly subscription fees and extra charges associated with ShipStation make it a better fit for businesses with larger budgets who can absorb these outgoings as they scale.

Key features

• Real-time package tracking

• Bulk label printing

• External mobile apps

• Inventory management tools

• Track delivery times in-app or with automatic notifications

• Integrations and API

Order management

ShipStation covers all the basics for shipping and order management, and offers a wider variety of features than ShipRush.

You can easily connect all of your sales channels, process orders, and get discounted shipping rates with leading carriers — as well as being able to combine, split, and filter orders, set up order alerts, and add color-coded labels to mark orders based on a unique identifier.

With order management reporting, you can quickly view, filter, and export the data you need for orders, either individually or in groups. Filter options help you export only the data you need, such as data within a specific date range, or from a specific carrier or store.

Inventory management

On the inventory management side, ShipStation offers some pretty good features, letting sellers view and manage stock within the app or from any mobile device.

You can allocate and deallocate stock for orders that are awaiting shipment, set up inventory alerts for low stock, and block attempts to ship any order with insufficient stock availability. 

Although ShipStation doesn’t have the capability to manage real-time stock levels, you can sync your inventory via the API to third-party inventory solutions if you need this feature.

Carrier Integrations

ShipStation offers native integrations and shipping discounts with leading carriers including USPS, UPS, and DHL Express.

If you want to bring your existing carrier accounts into ShipStation, this is allowed but will incur extra charges. Skip to the pricing section below to read more about this.

Integrations

Like ShipRush, ShipStation offers plenty of integrations. This means you can easily sync with leading ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon, Shopify, and eBay, as well as tools for ERP, accounting, logistics, and third-party vendors. There’s also an API for developers that is available on all paid plans.

ShipStation plans and pricing

ShipStation charges different monthly subscription plans and prices depending where your ecommerce business is based. All paid plans come with a 30-day free trial.

Here are the USA plan prices* as an example:

• ShippingEasy - free to use for sending up to 25 packages a month, with one user.

• Starter - $9.99 per month to ship up to 50 parcels a month for one user.

• Bronze - $29.99 per month for up to 500 parcels a month for one user.

• Silver - $59.99 per month. This lets you ship up to 1,000 parcels a month and add two users.

• Gold - $99.99 per month for three users and up to 2,000 packages a month.

• Platinum - $149.99 per month. This plan lets you add five users and ship up to 5,000 parcels a month.

• Enterprise - $229.99 USD per month. For high-volume sellers, this plan lets you ship up to 7,500 parcels a month and add 10 users.

• High-Volume - If you need even more shipping bandwidth, you can contact the ShipStation team to get a custom plan with unlimited shipping each month.

ShipStation's extra costs

Outside of the monthly subscriptions, you might also be charged extra fees, which can catch unwary sellers off guard. These include:

• Varied label printing charges depending on your carrier or postage provider

• Connecting your existing carriers accounts to ShipStation, which can cost an extra $5 to $95 a month, depending on your base plan

You’ll also need to keep a minimum of $10 USD in your ShipStation account at all times to cover label printing costs, and this can be automatically charged at any time to top up your balance.

Despite its popularity, the subscription prices and extra fees of ShipStation leave many ecommerce sellers on the fence about the cost-versus-value of this software. 

For sellers who are trying to keep monthly costs down, there are lots of alternative shipping and inventory management options out there that offer more value for a lower cost.

*Pricing last accessed May 2024

Pros of ShipStation

ShipStation has plenty of good reviews, with most customers appreciating the great integrations, a low learning curve during setup, and the ease of shipping management for ecommerce sellers. 

One customer mentions that it saves them time and makes operations more efficient because  “Our orders from Shopify, Amazon, manual orders, etc. flow through our inventory management software Stitch Labs which then routes it to Shipstation. Thus giving us one place for our order fulfillment center to work with.”

Cons of ShipStation

As is to be expected, reviewers commonly mention the downsides of ShipStation’s fees and costs, as well as their customer support being slow.

Other users comment that “Shipstation does not work well for users with a large number of product variations”, and they “cannot edit manual orders, but need to delete and re-create an order if changing quantity or amount of a product.”

There are also some bugs and technical issues, with one user commenting that the “Shipstation android app does not work with Shipstation Connect very well…and the Shipstation web-based application does not work well on small browser screens, so it is almost impossible and very painstaking to print labels from a phone.”

Veeqo : a better alternative to ShipRush and ShipStation

If the lack of inventory management features in ShipRush and the steep pricing of ShipStation have you scratching your head — Veeqo might be exactly what you’ve been searching for.

Veeqo is a free, multi-channel shipping software that’s part of the Amazon family. It helps you speedily pick and ship orders with the lowest possible commercial shipping rates, and gives you plenty of automations and inventory control tools.

And don't be put off by the fact it's free - no matter how big your ecommerce business is, or how fast you’re scaling, Veeqo is designed to support you at every stage of growth. Being owned by Amazon, it integrates seamlessly with Amazon's products and servies (including FBA, seller-fulfilled, MCF, and Amazon Shipping), and there are strict firewalls in-place so your off-Amazon sales data can't be accessed. Veeqo's data is even kept in separate server locations to give you added security if you sell on Shopify, Walmart, eBay and across other marketplaces.

Veeqo's comprehensive enterprise-grade features are at the ready whenever you need them, with shipping automations, warehouse tools, forecasting, and advanced analytics to help you speed up operations and make faster, data-driven marketing and sales decisions.

Order management

Fulfilling orders has never been so…fulfilling! Veeqo lets you connect all of your stores and marketplaces in the central dashboard so you can easily manage sales, stock, and shipping in one place.

Veeqo integrates easily with leading carriers, business tools, and ecommerce marketplaces — so whether you’re shipping from home or from multiple warehouses, you can start managing orders right away from the comfort of your Veeqo dashboard.

Pick, pack, and ship at lightning speed from your phone with Veeqo’s free mobile app, or use the Veeqo scanner for even more speed and accuracy.

Mike Truffa, owner of A1 Great Deals, who ship 700+ orders per day, says, “I personally use it [the Veeqo Scanner] religiously, I can’t live without it.”

We make shipping at scale a breeze, with automated rate shopping that keeps your prices down, and smart order routing that allocates orders to your nearest location or warehouse based on your customer’s delivery address.

You're also able to batch-print your shipping labels, which Mike says has saved him over 6-hours a day in time: “Ever since we’ve been able to print 100 labels at a time with packing slips, it’s saved hours of time a day.” he goes on to say “It would take all day.” He continued, “Being able to sort by SKU is wonderful because before I would have to look up each individual SKU if there were a lot of them, or I would have to print them all and then hand-sort them, because there was no good way to get the labels together. And to have to go through them one-by-one, it was just time consuming, especially when you’re doing some 700 orders per day.” Mike goes on to tell us it now only takes him two-hours to print all of his labels and packing slips, a time reduction of 75%, leaving him with an extra six hours per day to complete other business tasks.

Inventory management

If you want to ditch the Excel spreadsheets, or your multi-channel sales are suddenly skyrocketing, Veeqo has all the features you need to handle incoming and outgoing stock smoothly.

Unlike ShipRush and ShipStation, Veeqo has built-in inventory management and control features that update and sync stock across all of your connected sales channels and warehouses in real time.

For example, if you sell the last item of an SKU in your Shopify store, it will immediately be marked out of stock across all your other stores and marketplaces. This means you’ll never have to disappoint customers again with those awkward “sorry, that’s out of stock…” emails.

You’ll also get robust demand forecasting features so you can see at a glance which items are selling best on which marketplaces, which items aren’t doing so well, and which items might have upcoming demand.

Veeqo partnerships

Amazon

Although ShipRush and ShipStation integrate with Amazon, Veeqo has the unique advantage of being owned by Amazon itself. If you primarily sell via Amazon, it’s a match made in ecommerce heaven!

Veeqo is fully integrated with Amazon’s multi-channel fulfilment and shipping systems, including Amazon Shipping. This gives you high-level data security, access to Prime-speed parcel delivery, and account protection from late deliveries if you ship on time. 

Shopify 

The Veeqo app has been hand-picked by Shopify as a Shopify Plus partner. This means we have the features and support needed to handle the unique shipping needs of enterprise businesses who run on Shopify.

Veeqo pricing

Veeqo is completely FREE to use. That means no monthly subscriptions and no hidden charges, no matter how many parcels you send, or how many users you add to your account.

You’ll be able to automatically access the lowest commercially available carrier rates, based on our pre-negotiated pricing from UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL.

But wait, there’s more! Using Veeqo also means you can access the lowest commercially available rates, based on our pre-negotiated pricing from UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL and up to 5% back with Veeqo Credits.

For example, Mike from A1 earned over $13,000 back in Veeqo Credits between September 2023 and April 2024, and that number rises every single day. He told us, "We get Credits daily, we’ve gotten $13,469.36 back since September. It’s been a lot.”

Our free shipping software already saves sellers an average $1,200 a year when compared to similar shipping and inventory management solutions (one seller, eChapps, has saved over $15,000 per year in fees by switching to Veeqo). But when you combine the savings on the software itself, with the amount you can earn back in Veeqo Credits? The possibilities are huge.

So which software is best for your business?

If you’re looking to streamline your order management and create a branded experience for customers, then ShipRush is a popular choice. But it lacks built-in inventory management features which you’ll need to pay for and integrate separately. 

ShipStation is a more complete solution for ecommerce businesses, as it handles shipping and inventory in one place, but the steep monthly running costs and lack of real-time inventory control can be prohibitive for many sellers. 

If you’re looking for a comprehensive software solution that helps you manage your shipping and inventory effortlessly — Veeqo can solve all of your challenges for free.

Create your free Veeqo account today to discover how effortless shipping and order management can be.