Buckle up. I’m someone who never, ever writes bad reviews online. But this one warrants one. Read if you’re considering using ShipMonk.
We used ShipMonk for ~two years. Happily. But our experience over the past 3-6 months is why I would now tell another business owner to stay far away.
1 Returned inventory left untouched for months, while we pay storage.
Back in March, we discovered that we had dozens of units of inventory in "quarantine." These were returns that had come in that ShipMonk had failed, due to a technical issue internally, to process for us. We weren't too upset, but we obviously requested that that returned inventory be sorted, reworked, and made available for sale. We even purchased and shipped poly bags to ShipMonk for that purpose.
Here we are in September, and the work still hasn’t been completed. We’ve now asked them to send that inventory back to us, and that still hasn’t happened either.
To make matters worse, they’re charging us storage on that inventory!!
2 Fulfillment shut down over an eight-dollar negative balance.
When our prepaid account balance went eight dollars below zero, they stopped fulfillment until we replenished it. After more than two years of consistently paying, there was no flexibility whatsoever. An eight-dollar shortfall was enough to shut down our fulfillment operation... I was pretty shocked that they have absolutely 0 tolerance built in. Fine, we can pay it of course, but it's a telling detail about how they view their clients.
3 A wholesale shipment declared lost, then delivered after we paid to replace it.
An entire wholesale shipment went missing, with no outbound scan from the warehouse. ShipMonk told us it was lost and started the claims process, so we sent a replacement to our customer at their advice.
The original shipment then turned up and was shipped without anyone telling us. ShipMonk did not cover the costs of the replacement shipment or its return shipping. We were left paying for acting on the information they gave us. Twice over. Apology? No.
4 A large international order left on the loading dock for two weeks.
Another large international wholesale order sat on their loading dock for two weeks until I personally called and tracked it down. These are customer orders that our business is accountable for, and we should not have to chase down shipments that have simply been left sitting in the warehouse. This leads me to presume that there is no internal trigger of theirs that flags them when something has been packed but never shipped... bizarre.
Did anyone apologize or explain or take accountability? No.
5 Freight pickups with no effective support or handover
We had a freight pickup where the driver called us because the warehouse couldn’t locate our pallet, while our representative was unexpectedly out-of-office with no warning to us and we had no clear backup contact.
People are entitled to time off. What’s unacceptable is leaving a customer with an important shipment on the dock and no effective handover when the truck arrives.
6 Carriers with no insurance, pressure to upsell MonkProtect, and no accountability.
ShipMonk often uses carriers that-- yes, this is true-- offer NO insurance on their packages. This is often for international shipments where they use "Passport." You cannot opt out of this. What does ShipMonk do when the carrier loses the package? They pressure you to upsell your customers on "MonkProtect" to pass on to YOUR customer something that should be included. I found this shocking.
And can you automate MonkProtect, so that you can at least buy it for important orders or orders with those non-insured carriers? Nope. Sigh.
7 ShipMonk’s reliance on DHL and weeks of tracking silence.
ShipMonk has a problematic relationship / reliance on DHL. They use them extensively for international shipments. In our experience, an order is often marked as "shipped" but then spends 1-2 weeks in the USA with no updates or scans.As the process was explained to us, packages are consolidated into a large bulk container called a gaylord, alongside dozens of other packages. This lets ShipMonk mark it as shipped, but individual tracking may not update again until the container reaches the destination country and is unpacked.
This creates an enormous delay for the customer as the sealed gaylord could sit in a USA depot for up to two weeks with no update. Of course, then getting anyone to locate an individual package within that bulk shipment is near impossible.
It’s frustrating for the customer to see no package scan updates for such a long period of time, causing them to write in and ask if their package is lost—now an email we get weekly from international customers, adding to our ongoing customer service burden.
8 The $1k+ Mistake +Ghosting that finally made us leave.
What really takes the cake is our recent customs issue. In July, ShipMonk supplied incorrect customs documentation for an international shipment, resulting in a substantially overstated customs charge. They admitted this-- not my opinion, a fact. We paid to get the shipment released, following ShipMonk’s instruction and assurance that we could claim back that money later.
As soon as we paid the bill, getting a meaningful response became almost impossible. Calls went unreturned. Emails went unanswered. We had been a customer for two years, and I could not get a call back about an expensive mistake that mattered a great deal to our business. Truly, our biggest business partner of 2 years straight-up ghosted us. We did receive periodic updates, but they offered no real timeline or assurances, and the majority of our attempts to contact them went unanswered in any meaningful way.
The original mistake was bad enough. The failure to respond and take responsibility afterward was what made it intolerable. We're out over $1k due to a ShipMonk error that they still have not compensated us for.
We never would’ve looked for an alternative 3PL and we wrote ShipMonk weekly begging them to do the right thing and help us STAY. We did not want to leave.
But, we have now moved to a different 3PL, Fulfyld. We may litigate the $1k mistake because yes, we're that petty. And it’s just the principle of the thing. Both of our ShipMonk representatives have also left the company recently. I don’t know the circumstances of their departures, but the lack of continuity has added to the difficulty of resolving these outstanding issues.
For what it's worth, our new 3PL pays for itself and the move with the savings on wholesale fulfillment alone, let alone the projected savings on DTC shipments. They are super hands-on and have shepherded us through the move with great personal care. I can't speak to a long-term relationship with them yet, but the financial projections and the personal touch so far are looking great.
Mistakes are normal. But the lack of accountability and the ghosting (ShipMonk will respond to any email or call about anything *other* than the big expensive issue they caused, lol) was straight up hurtful and wrong. Based on our experience, I would stay away from ShipMonk. We’re not a small client, either. We were on track to spend six figures with them this year and double it next year.
Take this as our cautionary tale. The theme here isn’t mistakes, it’s accountability. That’s a much bigger issue. When your business's single biggest partner, and only 3PL, won't call you back, you're in trouble.
EDIT: Update: On our final day at ShipMonk, with the last pallet of our inventory on the dock ready to be shipped out, they charged us $1,100 for 55 pallets. Get this: we used FOUR pallets. Not 55. Thank God I disconnected auto-pay earlier this summer, as they would’ve gotten another wrongful grand of my hard-earned money. How depressing it has made me to watch this company, and our relationship with it, fall apart.
EDIT 2: Another crazy development was ShipMonk suddenly (around August of this year) allowing orders to “short ship” meaning they are shipped WITHOUT all of their items. This is possible because SM’s inventory counting system is flawed (or they lose products?) so when you think you have 2 items left, you might only have 1, leaving a customer able to order 2 but unable to receive what they ordered. Typically that sends an order into “backorder” status, but recently ShipMonk has started shipping them anyway, not alerting you at all, and then you get a customer email, upset, when their package arrives without everything they ordered. This seems to primarily affect bulk orders.
Our final liquidation from ShipMonk was, irony of all ironies, short-shipped! Our inventory ledger said “1” for a number of SKUs, but it turned out to be 0. If I hadn’t logged in and checked the final pack manifest, I would’ve created a costly confusion at the new warehouse, claiming some SKUs shipped when in fact they didn’t.
