Cate H.
1/5
I would not recommend Shipping and Handling of Texas for e-commence small businesses that need accurate inventory counts, shipment tracking numbers, real time inventory data or accurate billing invoices. From January - May 2019 I experienced a number of troubling issues and errors with Shipping and Handling of Texas' staff and their online client-facing portal called The Dashboard.
It took two months to get fully on-boarded only to find out that the dashboard does not show any received orders. It only shows completed orders. More often than not, the dashboard was "broken" and I would receive no outbound shipment data, making me believe the order had not been received, completed or both.
In April, so many orders were missing from the dashboard that Emily attempted to fix it by "pushing" all past orders from ShipWorks back to the dashboard. This caused numerous order duplications and as a result, incorrect negative inventory counts. I brought the errors to her attention because she never checked to the results of her "push".
SHoT accepts orders submitted in any electronic format, including .PDF's, but these orders are entered manually. On occasion, the orders would be entered incorrectly and the wrong number of items were sent to my customers at my expense. I was never refunded for these mistakes despite requesting reimbursement multiple times. Instead I was told to stop sending .PDF's and start sending .csv files. I made that change and still saw no improvement.
Additionally, pallet loads of outbound products were never documented in the dashboard. This caused large discrepancies in inventory data that only got worse month after month. Emily started the manual practice of performing a monthly "hard count" of all inventory. This only made my inventory counts correct at the time the hard count was recorded, i.e. incorrect 29/30 days of the month.
This was a huge concern for me. I never received replies from any of the principal members of the staff to my emails and calls questioning their procedures. George, Kevin, Emily and Adam were silent on the issue and offered no explanations or solutions to the inventory inaccuracies. I got the impression that Emily never understood where the problem was stemming from nor could she devise a solution that would yield accurate inventory counts. The issue was simply dropped.
However, the final straw for me was the April invoice. Emily and George felt that I should be billed at a higher rate due to all the manual hard count labor they were performing. (Because their procedures and system were failing them, they were incurring a loss on labor and therefore wanted to charge ME more.) The new rates suggested would effectively triple the cost of their services. Emily cited our existing contracted rates as "technicalities" and the resulting phone call with George was unsatisfactory and argumentative.
When we agreed to terminate our business relationship, George told me that I needed to make my own arrangements for transport of my products from their fully functioning logistics warehouse. This is a man that owns FOUR shipping, handling, courier and logistics companies. He finally agreed to arrange transport of my products, but couldn't guarantee that it would be done by the end of the month.
Thereafter, Shipping and Handling of Texas did not complete ANY outstanding customer orders and held onto my inventory for 3 business days. Additionally, they managed to ship back an entire pallet of obsolete inventory (trash) that I’d requested be thrown away months before.
Throughout our relationship SHoT refused to accept, acknowledge or fix the mistakes they made. In short, hiring Shipping and Handling of Texas was an emotionally painful nightmare as well as a financial business mistake.
