Tony tells PA Life about how the pandemic and lockdown affected him as an employer now and in the future.

2020 has been a significant year of constant change, and our clients have been requesting a variety of rules to keep their Shipster effective. Rule changes and additions are always no extra charge on top of your monthly support fee, and our technical team are always happy to create new functions to improve Shipster. Here are some of the top most used rules of 2020:

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.

Santa allows us to reveal the Shipster configuration he uses to send billions of parcels over Christmas.

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.

SkyNet specialise in providing custom shipping solutions for UK ecommerce companies to help them expand their business to the global market place. This accurately describes many current Shipster users, so we expect this integration to be popular.

Dates for shipping rule freezes, support line closure and how to get additional licences for the Christmas period.

Using our numerous shipping rules you can fully customise your Shipster to save you the most money when packing and shipping parcels. Here are 9 of the most common rules our clients use to reduce expenditure.

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.

Prepare for Black Friday: Our scheduled shipping rule freeze, help with additional installations and getting help on the day.

It's spooky season, which means scary movies, ghosts, costumes and trick-or-treat bans are on everyone's mind. Let's make it a work activity by thinking about what might be lurking in the unexplored shadows and crevices of your warehouse, by looking for these signs of ghostly activity...

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.

Rachel answers what it's been like providing Shipster support from home during the covid-19 pandemic.

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.

Since fashion e-commerce retailers form a large portion of Shipster users, we have developed a large range of shipping rules that cater to their unique needs. These rules are designed to help streamline the shipment of clothes and accessories, saving these businesses time and money!

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.

our first dedicated Irish processor!

📞 Telephone support will be closed. 📧 Email and ticket support will remain open.

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.

There may be more ways to reduce your warehouse costs than you would think…

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

The benefits of taking your despatch system to the next level with Shipster. Are you a small-to-medium business looking to take the leap?

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.

Our development team finished building this DHL Austria integration at the end of June and it is already being utilised by some of our customers. Please get in contact if you would like to find out more about how we could integrate your Shipster with DHL Austria, and countless other couriers.

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

We get a lot of requests about automating the decision making process for deciding which box/envelope packaging to use. The issue can be solved in several ways...

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.

Shipping internationally may be more complicated than you’d expect and involves navigating multiple countries’ varied postal systems and policies on foreign imports. Here are some of the ways Shipster can help streamline this process for you.

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!

Full integration completed in under two days!

📞 Telephone support will be closed. 📧 Email and ticket support will remain open.

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

Every now and then you will come across a shipment that refuses to cooperate. How do you process yours?

Loadstar coverage of the pandemic licence extension, 23 April 2020.

Internet Retailing Coronavirus round-up including Shipster pandemic measures article, 23rd April 2020.

The Business Desk pandemic licence extension article, 5th May 2020.

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

GM Chamber of Commerce pandemic licence extension article, 30th April 2020.

Business Up North pandemic licence extension article, 30 April 2020.

Client warehouses despatching goods such as PPE and medications are offered extra shipping software licences to boost distribution free of charge. MD calls it "a no brainer".

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.

Our fastest Integration build yet – Thanks to our sophisticated infrastructure and a glorious courier API...

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.

In fashion, customers are ditching bras for pyjamas (Adore Me’s new best selling item) and swimwear for loungewear. Customers seem to be putting off buying Spring-Summer collections, delaying the bikini and buying into comfort.

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).

Processing hundreds or thousands of shipments every day means even the smallest inefficiency in your shipping process can stack up unnecessary costs. Changing how you allocate and ship parcels according to their weight can be revolutionary.

Shipster Build Custom Shipping Integration for Global Pharmaceutical Distributor Mawdsleys

One of our record-speed integration builds!

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.

Our integration with Polar Speed is worth special mention because this is our first temperature-controlled supplier...

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.

Just a little entry about how we’re celebrating the festive season this year :)

Do you need to start looking into temperature-controlled shipping or curious about cold shipping in general? Let’s dive in…

"Here's to all the people who are delivering a merry Christmas in the UK. The factory workers, warehouse staff, pickers, packers and drivers..." Check out our video thanking every person involved behind the scenes when it comes to this manic time of year!

For Those That Don’t Know: Who are they? What happened? And how did they achieve one of the biggest beauty e-commerce launches in history?

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

Oddsphere have been added to the £1.45bn Digital Outcomes & Specialists 4 framework, making the company an official Crown Commercial Service Supplier

Hear Ye’ Hear Ye’ Shipster Updates & Newsletter Now Available.

The Most Popular Time to Start Christmas Shopping is October-November. Don’t be reactive this year, brace for impact.

Our Highlights: Latest Insights into the expectation of Delivery Customers, Black Friday Figures & eCommerce Innovations

Insider Media coverage of Oddsphere and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, 17th July 2019.

Oddsphere receive investment from Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.

Customer Services Director Damian Donnelly Joins Oddsphere Ltd in May 2019.

Shipster has relocated to Carvers Warehouse in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. More details here.