Manchester-based custom shipping integration platform, Shipster, announced the launch of its brand new after-sales service and returns portal in September this year.

We’re excited to announce our brand new after-sales service! From dispatch through to delivery, our clients will now be able to keep customers informed and up-to-date, with personalised information about their orders.

All the details for upcoming shipping rule freezes, additional licences and support during Black Friday.

We've added commodity codes to items in the despatch correction screen.

You can now remove orders in the Skipped Order screen.

In the past, when a job was talking to the Shipster API but failed, it was deleted. Now it creates a text file dump of the call to the API including all of the data and it's in the program data folder too under "Failedjobs".

Exceptions are now logged to a text file in the program data folder. If you turn on "debug" it will start logging all of the output text to the file. Try not to leave it on and forget, it'll take up a lot of space.

We've upgraded the "resetPricing" rule to be more intelligent. Rather than just splitting the prices by the total/quantities, it now works out the total that each item is worth and assigns the new values based on that. It will be much more accurate and work for pretty much any situation now.

We've added some new rule commands for better text manipulation. We've added the ability to "trim" specific text from the start and end of strings. You can "replace" specific pieces of text with other pieces of text (so replace "Londn" with "London"), and we have added in a "remove" function which just takes a string out of a field.

We've added the ability to manifest multiple accounts on Deutsche Post. If you have more than one Deutsche Post account with us, this will save you having to get these from the Deutsche Post website and improve your workflow.

We've added a PDF download button, making it possible to download any PDF documents/templates loaded into Shipster.

Information in the event of a Deal- or No Deal- scenario. Summary steps: 1. Send us your EORI number if you have not already 2. Add accurate descriptions to all your products, and put procedures in place to ensure it happen with all new products 3. Add commodity codes to your products and email support@shipstersolutions.com to tell us in which attribute we can find these codes.

We've added some new features that allow you to edit despatch files before they go through our rules processor. You can change the country, courier, pretty much anything before the shipment is attempted.

We've added a service map to our DHL Express plugin. You can optionally specify the duty/terms of shipping for the service meaning you can effectively target whether to charge the end customer duty.

We have added support for PVX kits where items can be grouped into kits.

Our MyHermes integration now supports labels in PDF format in addition to the existing format. The existing image format is large and requires scaling settings to be applied to print the label. Requesting the label as a PDF makes scaling configuration unnecessary.

Improved post-code formatting in the DPD plugin, making it more resilient to variation in how postcodes are represented - meaning you will have fewer cases where intervention is needed.

We have added the automatic creation of Purchase Orders in PVX from the data in Inventory Planner. As an extra funky feature, we've included automatic currency conversion between the two systems, which uses data refreshed 4 times a day.

Shipster now supports live currency conversion! Via a feed from our partner fixer.io we will update our conversion rates twice a day to keep it as accurate as possible. And via Shipsters internal plugin system we have deployed the new functionality across our entire platform, from our top of the range rules engine, to our PDF generator and customs documentation. Some of our more seasoned clients might be saying, “But, you already had currency conversion, I use it now!”, and you’d be right, but it’s done with a little trickery at the moment.. When order data is transferred into Shipster it is in the currency of the store it was sold in, which gives us an idea of the price of the total order and the individual items. But we also have access to the pricing data for the items themselves from your product database, which will be in your home currency. If we match up the items in the orders and work out the difference between the two, we have the conversion rate that was used in the shop and we can apply it to your whole order. If we don’t have the item prices in the store currency we can total up the entire order and work out the rate from that.

At the moment if you are using Peoplevox and you book in multiple packages in a single order, you will receive the tracking numbers as a comma-separated string. We realise this is not ideal, so we have updated our tracking number handler to identify and track multiple packages and tracking numbers separately. You can still get the tracking numbers as a comma string if you want, but if your sales platform integration is compatible, we can push the separate tracking IDs to the correct parcels on your PVX instance.

We’ve made some upgrades to our tracking number updater, which now allows it to grab data from the order and insert it into the tracking string. If you wanted to, for example, put the carrier name and service type code into your tracking string, so you can identify the shipment type while dealing with your tracking number, then this update will help. The use cases for this are narrow to be honest, but you can never have too much flexibility.

Via our new partnership with Amazon, we will soon be offering Amazon Vendor Central integrations into both Peoplevox and Linnworks. You’ll be able to push orders from your Amazon shop into PVX or Linnworks, and push shipment confirmations back up into Amazon. We’ll even take care of the reporting requirements on Amazon to save you some extra time. Contact Shipster support to arrange a chat about how it works.

Consignor users can now select labels for specific services in specific formats.

We've added 1) A service map, making it easier to map shipping requests to service codes. 2) A signature map. This recently came up for a client that requires an adult signature for items that must only be delivered to an adult.

We've added Europe-wide returns for DHL Germany.

Bulk Despatch Bulk despatch has added support for retrying bad connections - this makes its performance much more robust and reduces manual intervention.

We've added support to DHL for the shipping of dangerous goods - there are specific data fields that need to be filled out where dangerous goods are being shipped.

We can now generate barcodes for any data on the fly - previously this was only possible to do with Sales Order Numbers. This means that we can enhance the custom labels and documents that Shipster generates for you with custom barcodes to better support your workflow. Just think of the possibilities!

We've added support for sending delivery instructions to Yodel.

Amazon API credentials can now be overridden so that a single client can use more than one Amazon account, depending on your sales channel.

We've added support for extended properties at the item level (used to be only at Sales Order level), meaning we can bring in bespoke fields for each item in the Linnworks inventory (e.g. colour, size, etc..). We've also added support for complex dynamic filtering of Sales Orders, empowering you to set clear criteria around when orders pass into PVX.

We've added automatic service code filtering for DHL. If you're confused between your U's and your P's, don't worry, just send us any code in the right class (express/economy) and we'll automatically send the correct code onto DHL.

We've added 5 more countries to our advanced postcode formatting and validation code. We'll now detect and report faults with most international postcodes, and apply formatting where no fault is detected.

Actions we're taking during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

If you're using the latest version of Shipster, you may have noticed the new paper aeroplane loading screen that Tony spent several hours perfecting!

We've added new intelligent address splitting to ensure your address lines fit into the courier's requirements. We now automatically detect when lines need to be split, maintain spacing and keep numbering in the correct lines.

Move your tracking updates into Shipster and get courier/service updates done directly (in addition to your other regular system updates).

We've added the ability to save PDFs in a file location of your choice, be it Dropbox, the local file system or a network location. We can even apply rules to only save PDFs in certain situations e.g. saving all international invoices.

An Additional Support option for Clients stuck on a Stubborn Shipment.

We've added the ability to reverse the look-up mechanism. Instead of comparing values in the rules to values within the despatch information, you can compare the despatch information to the values within the rules.

In 2019, we found ourselves implementing automatic postcode corrections for a few clients who wanted to cut down the time it takes to check and correct manually. Due to its popularity and effectiveness, we plan to roll this out as a feature for everyone in 2020.

Here are the trendiest custom shipping rules of 2019 – ideas that have seen many of our clients through a fantastic year of growth for not a penny more. Perhaps there’s something that can be adapted for your warehouse in 2020!

We've added the new comparison method "any", to be added to the existing "and" and "or". This means you don't need 100% matching between conditions, you only need each condition to match once.

Giving our clients the power to control their own configuration without having to pick up the phone.