Blog: storeBlox CS

ShipStation integration now available

2020 may be a year to forget in many ways, but we’ve been plugging away at some big changes for 2021 that we’re excited to show you very soon. In the meantime, we’re happy to announce that storeBlox CS now supports ShipStation!

ShipStation Logo

Yep, in addition to the roughly six-bajillion shipping options (we might be exaggerating that number, please don’t call your lawyer) currently available in storeBlox CS, you can now integrate directly with ShipStation!

ShipStation is a nifty service for shipping at best available rates, printing shipping labels, tracking shipments and a whole lot more. When you plug in ShipStation to your storeBlox CS company store (and it’s super easy, just see below), your storeBlox CS orders are pushed into ShipStation; when you ship orders the tracking information is synchronized with your storeBlox CS store automatically.

ShipStation admin screen in storeBlox CS

A few fields is all you need to get set up, but as always we’re here to help you through the process. Just drop us a line or give us a shout at 512-867-1001 and we’ll get you set up. Need to learn more about setting up your shipping options? Check out our Video Learning Center for walkthroughs and tips.

Success Story: Using Loyalty Marketing to Build your Brand

If you haven’t checked out our loyalty marketing email system yet, we’ve got even more reasons for you to get familiar with it. Loyalty marketing emails allow you to schedule followup emails based on a number of events, like a registration or a purchase.

We’ve detailed before how this can be used to automatically remind a customer when it’s time to re-order, or to send a new user a coupon after they’ve registered. But you can also use it to directly build your brand and reputation by soliciting followup reviews.

Avery Manko of the Manko Company did just that, to great success:

“The loyalty marketing feature is brilliant. I have several automations set up but my favorite is an automation for collecting Google reviews. It was super easy to set up: for the subject line I wrote ‘Can I ask a favor’ I then wrote a simple email that asks the customer if they’d be willing to write a review and I included the link to my Google Reviews that takes them to my reviews page. It was that simple.”

—Avery Manko

The result? Dozens of five-star reviews since he started requesting reviews. Now, soliciting reviews may not be right for every situation; you’d never use it for a private-access company store, for example. But for distributor stores and retail-oriented company stores, reviews can make a huge difference not just in exposure, but also in click-thoughs – users are much more likely to click on businesses and web sites that have good ratings.

Check out the Manko Company here, and if you’d like to learn more about our marketing automation tools, we’ve got an instructional video for you as well as an overview here on the blog.

Group-based shipping methods

Among a number of small improvements and fixes in our first storeBlox CS release of 2019, we also launched Group-based shipping methods. storeBlox has Group functionality baked deep into the system, and it’s a great feature for variety of situations:

  • Assigning product access to groups: For example, your store can be set up so managers can see everything, while other users see only specific categories or products. This can be helpful if managers have access to free products, literature or other items that other users shouldn’t be able to view. You can even set up groups with their own landing pages and banners, creating Micro Stores.
  • Payment by group: Often, a store may make certain payment methods (like departmental budgets) only available to certain users. Group payment methods let you assign available payment methods to specific groups, and Group Approvers enables you to have an approver review and approve all the orders for a specific group.

There’s a lot more to Groups, so drop us a line if you need help understanding how to set them up and manage them. This month, we added Group-based shipping methods, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – you can now control access to any shipping method by group:

storeBlox CS group-based shipping

This extends the capability to control available shipping methods to Groups. For example, if your managers have access to free shipping or local delivery, but other users need to use only FedEx or UPS, you can now assign any shipping method by group!

Other updates

The latest release also brings additions to your Order Export, and a we’ve added the ability to opt out of Loyalty Marketing emails during registration and account editing. This is separate from general opt out of marketing emails.

As always, if you have any questions about setting things up or just need a custom demo or help selling, just give us a shout!