Whiplash Reviews: Pricing, Storage and Order Processing
Order fulfillment service involves third-party vendors that fulfill orders for other companies such as online sellers and eCommerce stores. With the service, you are able to tap into the warehouse and distribution facilities of the fulfillment service provider to reduce infrastructure and logistical costs as well as improve operational efficiency. For an online business, fulfillment is a big challenge especially on the essential aspects of storage, shipping and delivery. A fulfillment service takes care of those. In our continuing series on order fulfillment services, we examine another service provider through this Whiplash reviews, and take a look at its core features, benefits, and pricing structure.
What is Whiplash?
Whiplash is a modern order fulfillment service that is built to scale and takes care of the fulfillment workload for your eCommerce and online selling business. It can handle the day to day management of inventory and fulfillment as well as provide integration and technical support. The service utilizes automation features to streamline vital fulfillment processes from ordering, payment, product tracking, shipping and delivery. It harnesses a network of warehouses for easy product storage and global distribution, and its real time item monitoring and information ensures that every product stored and shipped is accounted for.
Its smooth integration with major eCommerce platforms provides operational flexibility and boosts business performance, allowing you to concentrate on selling and building your business and letting the service handle logistics, warehousing, inventory management, payment processing, shipping and more. Its API allows you to create apps for particular tasks related to items and orders. The Whiplash system can generate return shipping labels for your customers as well as give you complete visibility of your order flow. You can control which items can be exchanged or set items which cannot be returned such as seasonal or final-sale items. The rule-based workflow lets you set parameters for operational efficiency and smooth management.
Though much of the bulk of fulfillment is taken off your hands, Whiplash ensures that you get a view of the essentials – products, items, orders, inventory, shipping – that you have entrusted to the service, and even lets you do last minute adjustment and changes before orders ship. What you will notice with our Whiplash reviews is the focus on areas the service truly shines – its flexibility, scalability and keeping everything organized.
Whiplash Warehouses
Whiplash’s US and international facilities lets you deliver to customers fast. Its network of warehouses can be found in the following locations:
- California (Cypress, Mira Loma, Oyster Point, Redwood City, San Francisco, Sante Fe Springs, SF Dogpatch, Union City)
- Kentucky (Louisville)
- Michigan (Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti)
- New Jersey (Clifton)
- Oregon (Portland – Swan Island)
- Texas (Rockwall)
- Florida (Oldsmar)
- Maine (Eliot)
- Nevada (Las Vegas, Reno)
- Ohio (Cincinnati)
- Pennsylvania (Wilkes-Barre)
- Canada (Montreal)
- United Kingdom (London)
How Does Whiplash Work?
Getting started with Whiplash is the most important part of process when you sign up with the service. Basically, it involves three things:
- Input your items to Whiplash – To fulfill your orders, you need get a roster of your products into the Whiplash system. This is a straightforward thing to do since once you connect your sales platform or webstore (Shopify, Magento, etc) to Whiplash, it will automatically import your products to their system.
- Create a ship notice – This is a simple document that you create whenever you are shipping product to Whiplash. It gives Whiplash’s warehouse a heads up that your product is on the way and that the service provider should be prepared to check it in.
- Ship your products to Whiplash – When shipping to Whiplash your inventory, there are a few ways you can handle this such as adding your products to your Whiplash account so that they can be identified, counted in against your list, and be tracked.
The above are the first key steps in doing business with Whiplash. There are succeeding procedures that you need to understand and be aware of and, fortunately, Whiplash provides an extensive documentation page to guide you in the processes involved.
Key Features
- Easy setup and simple navigation
- Local and international shipping
- Integration with leading shopping carts and Ecommerce platforms
- Automatic syncing of eCommerce products to the service
- Last minute modification of orders
- Inventory management
- Real time item tracking and information
- Returns, exchange and refund
- Customizable, rules-based order flow
- Product bundles and volume shipping
- Discounted shipping rates with selected carriers
- Payment processing
- Orders ship as they’re placed
- Store and ship products from US to anywhere in the world
- API key
- Scalable and flexible service platform
Whiplash Integrations
Some of the biggest shopping carts, ecommerce platforms, and other third-party services offer integrations with Whiplash to get you up and running in minutes. These include:
- Shopify – leading hosted commerce platform
- Magento – enterprise-level ecommerce
- BigCommerce – top ecommerce SaaS solution
- WooCommerce – popular ecommerce platform
- E-junkie – lightweight, embeddable shopping cart
- Stitchlabs – multi-channel sales and inventory solution
- Skubana – advanced order, inventory and analytics platform
- Big Cartel – ecommerce platform for artists
- Bandcamp – publishing platform for bands
- Paypal – leading online payment system
In addition, a Whiplash API is available so you can create an application to do any task you would typically do on WhiplashMerch.com. Among other things, you can use the API to get a list of all orders that have been shipped recently, create new orders, or change order addresses before they’re shipped out.
Benefits of Whiplash
Fulfillment services unburden you from one of the biggest online selling challenges and worries – on-time, guaranteed delivery. Those of Whiplash, and many other similar services, are built to provide efficient and prompt shipping so that items ordered by your customers get to them within the allotted time period. There may be added features or “come-ons” offered by service providers so they could end up on your preferred choices. For Whiplash, there are three major benefits:
- Connected – The service connects easily with major shopping carts and eCommerce platforms so that when orders come through your store, Whiplash automatically receives them and processes the orders. Once products are shipped for delivery, the service updates your store with tracking information, closes the order, and updates your inventory.
- Scalable – Whether they are a few orders or thousands, Whiplash provides the same level of fulfillment service, tapping into its multiple facilities, elastic staffing, and over half a dozen shipping options. The service can even aggregate/bundle shipping volumes to qualify for lower rates. Most of the processes involved – from orders, payment and shipping – are streamlined for your ease and convenience so you can focus more on growing your business.
- Personalized – Up until the moment they are shipped, you can pause, edit, or cancel orders for one reason or another, giving you unprecedented control and personalization of the ordering process. You have an API key that you can configure to support and cover endpoints such as orders, items, ship notices, web hooks and bundle items.
Pricing
Whiplash pricing is determined by orders per month and comes in 4 categories:
- Lite (up to 500 orders/month) – $2.95
- Small (up to 1,000) – $2.50
- Medium (up to 5,000) – $2.25
- Large (up to 50,000) – $1.90
The above, however, only refers to packing fees. There are other fees for additional items for an order, for promotional items, serial number collection, product barcoding, returns, and storage. You can check out Whiplash’s pricing page to get more details and particulars.
Whiplash Alternatives
There are several order fulfillment services currently available. Below are some Whiplash alternatives that you can consider.
- Fulfillment by Amazon – Commonly referred to as FBA, it allows practically anyone to sell their products or items on the Amazon platform. The service will store your items in any of Amazon’s numerous warehouses worldwide, supervise its handling and shipment to your customers, handle payments and refunds, and provide customer service. FBA takes much of the tasks from you, freeing you up to focus on marketing and promoting your products, and attracting traffic to your eCommerce site.
- FedEx Fulfillment – Relatively new to the industry, this eCommerce solution was launched early in 2017. It is a subsidiary of FedEx Corp. and helps small and medium-sized companies fulfill orders from multiple channels including online marketplaces and websites, and handle inventory for their retail outlets. The solution is an integrated supply chain product that utilizes an easy-to-use platform and FedEx’s renowned transportation networks.
- Fulfillify – Built on a robust mobile-first responsive technology, the platform is easy to set up and use. It allows customers to monitor their orders, inventory and products in real-time using any device, giving them absolute control over their fulfillment needs at all times. The service also seamlessly integrates with users’ existing eCommerce and shopping cart systems.
You can head over to our fulfillment services reviews for more providers and comprehensive analyses of benefits, pricing and features.
Is Whiplash for you?
Acquiring a product or availing of a service is largely determined by two factors: cost and suitability for your business. For the cost factor, it helps to compare the pricing plans offered. You may notice that for order fulfillment services there are a lot of fees involved (i.e. for storage, for shipping, for volume of order per month, for size of items). You may opt for a service with lower and fewer fees, but then you may miss out on important service components. As for the suitability factor, it boils down to the features you need. Different businesses, depending on size and volume of operation, have different requirements. You have to make sure that you get the features you need for what you pay for.
Whether Whiplash is right for you is something we are in no position to decide for you. Our Whiplash reviews serve only as guidepost, providing you the most relevant information so that when the time to choose comes, you’ll be able to make an intelligent decision.
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