Shipwire is powering merchant expansion throughout the U.S., Canada and the UK.

We are really excited for our customer RockGardn.com who was profiled in The Wall Street Journal today. We are proud to be helping merchants reach new markets, cut shipping costs and grow their sales. Our innovative ecommerce order fulfillment and warehouse logistics service is providing merchants a new tool for International success. You can read about how Shipwire is helping merchants like RockGard’n by visiting our news page.

For many retailers the holiday shopping season starts right after last years holiday decorations are being taken down and most people are still trying to live up their New Years resolutions. Throughout this year, Shipwire has released how-to guides and checklists to help retailers prepare for the holiday season. Case in point, our Guide to Holiday Importing.

With the holidays fast approaching many businesses are now receiving inventory from domestic and international suppliers. Many merchants are looking for overflow storage and additional warehouse space in the U.S., Canada and Europe. If this is you, your first stop should be Shipwire. To make it easy, we have released a new offer to try Shipwire for no risk. 50 free orders fulfilled by Shipwire from any of our warehouses located in the U.S., Canada and Europe. Learn how to get 50 orders fulfilled for no cost. To see our press release announcing the offer visit Shipwire In the News.

There was an article in the Economist this week that discussed the challenges facing the U.S. housing market and it touched on the logistics market. It got a few of us over at Shipwire thinking about some recent trends in the global economy and how they may effect this year’s holiday shopping. Read more

The Shipwire team is really growing to love Chicago. Shipwire was out in force at the Stone Edge User Conference and Internet Retailer last week and Chicago really treated us well. The weather held up well and we even got to check out some of Chicago’s amazing architecture and cultural scene like Millennium Park. Fantastic city, great music, wonderful people and we made some great business connections. Read more

Shipwire went to Stoneedge User Con 2008 outside of Chicago this weekend to support the Shipwire Stoneedge Order Manager Shipping and Order Fulfillment Solution. It was a small but jam packed show that Barney and the whole Stoneedge team did a great job putting together. Read more

The Shipwire tradeshow team is going to have a very busy June in Chicago. We will be attending lots of tradeshows and user conferences to support our partners and merchants. Read more

A few weeks ago a few of our merchants submitted case studies to Alibaba’s eBusiness Champion Contest. I thought that they were actually very cool case studies of how entrepreneurs at various stages of business are using Shipwire to automate their ecommerce order fulfillment. What is particularly interesting is how these merchants sourced products internationally on Alibaba.com. Read more

The Shipwire engineering, operations and development staff have been incredibly busy over the past couple months releasing new warehouse management, inventory management and order fulfillment features and service offerings.

There has been so many new features released in the past few weeks that I’m having trouble keeping up to date blogging all the details and uploading screenshots. Rather than cry about it, I’m going to celebrate it with a long blog post with lots of new features. If your interested in seeing it all and playing with the system functionality please create an account or free trial (no credit card, only an e-mail address). Read more

This Procrastinators Guide to Holiday Importing was written by our executive team and marketing really thanks Saul Smith, Shipwire Chief Logistics Officer, for really giving us some great real-world data to help guide merchants.

If you are thinking about importing inventory, whether it be toys, electronics or apparel for Holiday sales in 2008 it is time to review your product sources, put in orders and start figuring out the most cost effective method of getting your inventory to the right warehouse.

You’re probably saying, wait…its March…You have to be kidding me. Sorry to burst your bubble. If you import, getting over the ‘08 holiday bah-humbugs early is critical!

One of the dirty little secrets of logistics is that there is a glut of space available during the first 6 months of the year and more merchandise than space the second six months of the year. It doesn’t matter if your shipping by boat, train, plane, truck or your having Tom Tuttle from Tacoma Washington hand deliver it for you. The closer you get to September and October the more expensive rates get and the harder it is to meet your delivery time lines. Read more