The Shipwire team has been working diligently on a huge product enhancement that we’re about to unveil; but, that didn’t stop the team from getting some great new features out the door late last week. After testing over the weekend, everything is looking good; but, as always please contact support if you experience anything unexpected on Monday.

Here are some new features you can find in your account:

Custom Customer Name For Drop Shippers

Just in time for the holidays, we now have new feature for merchants or manufacturers that drop ship. If you don’t know what drop shipping is and you manufacture product; take a moment to review the drop ship verse order fulfillment post from February.

The new enhancement relates to the name on the packing list and the automated customer e-mail notifications (delight tool). Manually entered orders can now be edited for company name that is sending the product. A good example of this is if your a toy supplier (Sam the Supplier) and you allow a retailer (Rob the Retailer) to sell one of your toys. When you take the order you can ship it from your Shipwire account and send it out with a packing slip that says “Rob the Retailer” instead of “Sam the Supplier”. Ship confirmation e-mails will have the same name as the packing slip. If you have to process a return on the order, the return label/RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) will also have the same name as the original packing slip.

We’ve been testing this with a few of our customers for a bit and now it’s available for everybody. Hope this helps for those online sales channels over the holidays.

Intelligent Order Routing For Merchants With Goods In Multiple Countries

That is a mouthful of a title for an order routing feature that has been made very simple. We upgraded our order routing logic for merchants that are storing the same SKU (product) in multiple countries. The problem reported by some customers is a tad complex, please bear with the explanation.

Example: Let’s say you were selling widget 1 in the USA for a while and you wanted to sell widget 1 in the UK (move products closer to buyers to cut shipping costs). Once you got Widget 1 into the UK, you sold out in the USA and a new supply hadn’t come in, leaving the only active inventory for widget 1 in the U.K. With me so far?   If a buyer in the USA ordered from your online cart (because you had inventory available) previously, Shipwire generally optimized routing to get orders to ship as soon as possible.   This was almost always what merchants expected (speed of shipment); however, our users in multiple countries asked us for intelligence to temporarily back order orders for out-of-stock SKU’s that were anticipated for a receiving sometime in the future. If you need to get the order out fast, you can now modify the back order to ship from the overseas location (manually override the back order).

In short, the order routing logic has been upgraded to better balance shipping cost with time to ship.

Relaxed Address Length Restrictions

We’ll be posting a help knowledge-base solution soon that details new address length restrictions. The short of it is that the Address Verification system will now accept longer address lengths.

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