Help Center
Everything you need to know about using ShipWave. Browse by topic or search for a specific question.
Getting Started
Create your account and ship your first package
Shipping Labels
Create, print, and manage shipping labels
ShipWave Channels
Sell on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Etsy, TikTok, and EU marketplaces
- ShipWave Channels overview
- Getting started with ShipWave Channels
- Connecting Amazon Seller Central
- Connecting eBay
- Connecting Walmart Marketplace
- Connecting Etsy
- Connecting TikTok Shop
- Managing multiple channels
- Reconnecting and troubleshooting connections
- Creating marketplace listings
- Bulk listing operations
- Understanding listing statuses
- Pushing and syncing listings
- Listing validation by platform
- Creating listing templates
- Mapping categories to marketplaces
- Required category attributes
- Setting up pricing rules
- Advanced pricing formulas
- How inventory sync works
- Inventory buffers and floors
- Preventing overselling
- Importing marketplace orders
- Fulfilling marketplace orders
- Tracking sync to marketplaces
- Understanding sync logs
- Troubleshooting sync issues
- Reusable marketplace listing templates
- Connecting Mirakl-powered marketplaces
- Connecting Allegro
- Connecting Bol.com
- Connecting Cdiscount
- Connecting Otto.de
- Connecting Kaufland Global Marketplace
Orders & Batches
Manage orders, batch processing, and fulfillment
Tracking & Returns
Track shipments, handle returns, and file claims
Tracking & Marketing
Branded tracking, cross-sell, and customer marketing campaigns
Returns & Claims
Branded returns portal, disposition rules, and customer claim filing
Account & Billing
Manage your account, warehouses, payment methods, and plans
Wholesale & B2B
Set up wholesale pricing, customer groups, and B2B workflows
- Getting started with wholesale & B2B pricing
- Creating and managing customer groups
- Setting up pricing rules
- Configuring volume (quantity break) pricing
- Managing wholesale applications
- Adding wholesale blocks to your Shopify theme
- Setting up wholesale shipping rules
- Using net terms for wholesale customers
- Creating wholesale draft orders
- Importing and exporting wholesale pricing
- Testing wholesale pricing with test mode
- Migrating from legacy wholesale tiers to v2
Multi-Warehouse & 3PL
Organizations, brands, custom domains, and 3PL billing
- Organizations and Brands: how multi-tenant ShipWave works
- Inviting team members and the six ShipWave roles explained
- Switching between Brands in the admin header
- Setting up a custom subdomain for your Brand portal
- Connecting a custom domain to your Brand portal
- 3PL billing: setting per-brand rates and reviewing monthly invoices
EDI & B2B Retail
Sell to Walmart, Target, and other big-box retailers via EDI
- EDI overview: how ShipWave connects you to Walmart, Target, and big-box retailers
- Connecting a trading partner (Walmart, Target, etc.) to ShipWave
- Receiving purchase orders: how 850s become ShipWave orders
- Sending ASNs and tracking at ship time
- Printing GS1-128 carton labels and VICS BOLs
- Compliance dashboard, chargebacks, and the manual ASN fallback
AI Assistant & MCP
Use ShipWave with Claude, Cursor, and AI rule recommendations
Supplier Management
Suppliers, purchase orders, dropshipping, and live inventory feeds
Kitting & Manufacturing
Kits, bills of materials, manufacturing orders, and substitution
Profitability & COGS
FIFO costing, marketplace fees, profitability, and opportunities
Smart Rate Shopping
SmartRate, delivery promises, and carrier performance reports
Mobile Picker & Scanning
Mobile PWA for picking, packing, cycle counting, and lot tracking
International Shipping & DDP
Cross-border shipping, duties at checkout, and Zonos integration
Automation
Automation rules, conditions, and actions
Inventory Forecasting
Demand forecasts, reorder points, and inventory planning
Carriers
Regional carriers, manifest generation, and USPS programs
All Help Articles
Creating your ShipWave account
Sign up in under a minute and start comparing shipping rates immediately.
Shipping your first package
A step-by-step walkthrough of creating and purchasing your first shipping label.
Comparing shipping rates
How ShipWave compares rates across USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, and regional carriers.
International shipping and customs
Everything you need to know about shipping internationally with ShipWave.
Voiding and refunding labels
How to cancel unused shipping labels and get a refund.
Scheduling a carrier pickup
Have USPS, UPS, or FedEx pick up packages from your location.
Connecting your Shopify store
Import orders from Shopify and sync tracking numbers back automatically.
ShipWave Channels overview
Sell on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, and TikTok Shop from one dashboard.
Getting started with ShipWave Channels
A quick-start guide to connecting your first marketplace and pushing your first listing.
Connecting Amazon Seller Central
Complete guide to connecting your Amazon seller account via SP-API.
Connecting eBay
Connect your eBay seller account to list products and manage orders.
Connecting Walmart Marketplace
Connect your Walmart Seller Center account using API credentials.
Connecting Etsy
Connect your Etsy shop to list handmade and vintage items.
Connecting TikTok Shop
Connect your TikTok Shop to sell products directly through TikTok.
Managing multiple channels
Best practices for managing multiple marketplace channels from one dashboard.
Reconnecting and troubleshooting connections
How to fix connection issues and reconnect expired or failed marketplace channels.
Creating marketplace listings
How to create individual listings for products on your marketplace channels.
Bulk listing operations
Create, update, and manage listings in bulk for efficient catalog management.
Understanding listing statuses
What each listing status means and how to handle status changes.
Pushing and syncing listings
How to push listings to marketplaces and keep them in sync.
Listing validation by platform
Platform-specific listing requirements and how to pass validation.
Creating listing templates
Build reusable templates with variables for dynamic listing content.
Mapping categories to marketplaces
How to map Shopify product types to marketplace category taxonomies.
Required category attributes
Understanding and filling in marketplace-required attributes for each category.
Setting up pricing rules
Control how Shopify prices translate to each marketplace with markup rules, rounding, and formulas.
Advanced pricing formulas
Create custom pricing formulas for complex pricing scenarios.
How inventory sync works
Understanding real-time and periodic inventory synchronization across channels.
Inventory buffers and floors
Configure safety stock settings to prevent overselling on marketplaces.
Preventing overselling
How ShipWave prevents overselling across multiple marketplace channels.
Importing marketplace orders
How marketplace orders are automatically imported into ShipWave and Shopify.
Fulfilling marketplace orders
How to fulfill marketplace orders through ShipWave and sync tracking back.
Tracking sync to marketplaces
How tracking numbers are automatically pushed to marketplace platforms.
Understanding sync logs
How to read and interpret sync logs for troubleshooting and monitoring.
Troubleshooting sync issues
Common sync problems and how to fix them.
Managing orders
View, filter, and fulfill orders from Shopify and marketplace channels.
Batch label processing
Create shipping labels for multiple orders at once.
Tracking shipments
Monitor your shipments and set up branded tracking pages for your customers.
Handling returns
Set up a self-service return portal and manage return requests.
Filing shipping claims
How to file damage, loss, or missing item claims with carriers.
Managing your account
Update your profile, password, warehouse addresses, and team settings.
Understanding billing and payments
How ShipWave charges for shipping labels and what to expect on your statement.
Getting started with wholesale & B2B pricing
An overview of ShipWave's wholesale system and how to activate it for your store.
Creating and managing customer groups
Organize your wholesale customers into groups with different pricing, limits, and payment terms.
Setting up pricing rules
Override default group discounts for specific products, collections, or variants.
Configuring volume (quantity break) pricing
Offer bigger discounts for larger orders with automatic quantity-based pricing tiers.
Managing wholesale applications
Review, approve, and manage applications from potential wholesale customers.
Adding wholesale blocks to your Shopify theme
Install the signup form, volume pricing table, quick order form, and more on your storefront.
Setting up wholesale shipping rules
Offer free shipping, flat rates, or discounted shipping for your wholesale customer groups.
Using net terms for wholesale customers
Offer deferred payment terms and track invoices with automated reminders.
Creating wholesale draft orders
Create orders on behalf of wholesale customers with automatic discount application.
Importing and exporting wholesale pricing
Bulk manage pricing rules and volume tiers using CSV files.
Testing wholesale pricing with test mode
Safely verify your wholesale configuration before rolling it out to real customers.
Migrating from legacy wholesale tiers to v2
Upgrade from ShipWave's original four-category system to the full multi-group pricing engine.
Organizations and Brands: how multi-tenant ShipWave works
The structure 3PLs use to run multiple client brands from one ShipWave account without mixing data.
Inviting team members and the six ShipWave roles explained
Add staff, brand owners, and pickers to your Organization with the right level of access.
Switching between Brands in the admin header
How org-level staff jump between client Brands or view aggregated data across all of them.
Setting up a custom subdomain for your Brand portal
Give each Brand its own slug.shipwave.app URL for customer returns and order tracking.
Connecting a custom domain to your Brand portal
Point your own domain (orders.acme.com) at ShipWave for a fully white-labeled customer experience.
3PL billing: setting per-brand rates and reviewing monthly invoices
Configure storage, receiving, pick, and shipping markup rates per Brand and finalize invoices via Stripe.
EDI overview: how ShipWave connects you to Walmart, Target, and big-box retailers
A plain-English intro to EDI, the 850/856/810 document types, and how ShipWave's SPS Commerce partnership eliminates the headache.
Connecting a trading partner (Walmart, Target, etc.) to ShipWave
Onboard a new retailer through our SPS Commerce integration, with sandbox testing before going live.
Receiving purchase orders: how 850s become ShipWave orders
How inbound EDI POs are imported, routed, and matched to your products via the routing guide and SKU map.
Sending ASNs and tracking at ship time
How ShipWave generates and sends 856 ASNs with SSCC carton detail and surfaces compliance metrics.
Printing GS1-128 carton labels and VICS BOLs
How ShipWave generates compliant carton labels with SSCC, lot, and expiry data, plus VICS BOL PDFs for LTL freight.
Compliance dashboard, chargebacks, and the manual ASN fallback
Monitor ASN on-time, OTIF, PO ack latency, and chargeback risk. Send manual ASNs when SPS is down.
Ask ShipWave: the in-dashboard AI assistant
Run natural-language queries against your orders, shipments, returns, and inventory without leaving the dashboard.
Connecting ShipWave to Claude Desktop and Cursor
Use ShipWave as an MCP server so your local AI agent can run shipping operations directly.
API scopes explained
Lock down what each API key and agent can do with ShipWave's granular scope system.
The Rule Recommender
Nightly AI analyst that watches your shipping patterns and surfaces automation rule suggestions you can accept in one click.
AI budgets and rate limits
How daily budgets, per-tool rate limits, and the audit log keep AI usage predictable and safe.
Smart Rate Shopping overview
Use real carrier transit performance — not published transit days — to pick the cheapest rate that will actually arrive on time.
Rate shopping profiles
Save named rate-shopping strategies (cheapest, fastest, preferred carrier with fallback) and assign them per channel or per warehouse.
The Promise Engine and Shopify widget
Show shoppers a real "order in next 4h 12m for delivery by Wed" countdown driven by SmartRate — not a hardcoded promise.
Carrier performance reports
See on-time rates by carrier, service, and lane — and how much Smart Rate Shopping has saved you this month.
Supplier management overview
When to use suppliers vs. warehouses, and how ShipWave models dropship, wholesale, and hybrid fulfillment.
Adding suppliers and mapping SKUs
Create a supplier record, attach contacts and ship-from addresses, and map your internal SKUs to the supplier's codes and UPCs.
Purchase orders: manual and auto-PO
Create POs by hand or let the daily auto-PO engine draft them for you based on reorder points, lead times, and sales velocity.
Receiving purchase orders
How to receive POs in part or in full, how received quantities flow into inventory, and how the receipt audit trail works.
The supplier portal and dropshipping
Send suppliers a portal link, see what they see, and route dropship orders with three flexible ship options.
Supplier delivery formats
Five ways to deliver orders to a supplier: portal login, CSV email digest, SFTP file drop, signed webhook, or pull API.
Supplier feeds and live inventory
Pull live inventory from suppliers via SFTP, HTTPS, or API. Map fields with drag-and-drop. Drift detection blocks bad data from hitting marketplaces.
Kits vs. BOMs: which one should you use?
Understand the difference between virtual kits assembled at ship time and pre-manufactured finished goods built from a Bill of Materials.
Creating a kit
Build a virtual bundle from existing components. Availability and component decrement happen automatically at ship time.
BOMs and manufacturing orders
Define a Bill of Materials, issue a manufacturing order, and track labor + scrap as components are consumed and finished goods are produced.
Substitution groups
Let any of several interchangeable SKUs satisfy a kit or BOM component slot. Track which one actually shipped for accurate cost and warranty data.
Kit and BOM returns policy
Choose whether returned kits come back as individual components or as a single re-assembled unit. Lot-controlled recalls handled automatically.
FIFO COGS: how ShipWave costs your inventory
Why First-In-First-Out costing matters for accounting accuracy, how cost layers are built from receipts and adjustments, and how consumption stays atomic at ship time.
Marketplace fee ingestion
How ShipWave pulls real fee data from Amazon, Shopify, eBay, and Walmart so your profitability numbers reflect what each channel actually charges you.
The profitability dashboard
See revenue, COGS, fees, shipping, and overhead stacked together to understand real net margin per order, SKU, channel, and warehouse.
Inventory valuation
See the dollar value of every SKU sitting on your shelves and snapshot month-end totals for accounting.
Opportunities Found: 8 ways ShipWave spots money on the table
Heuristics that surface SKUs losing money, declining margins, cheaper suppliers, slow movers, and shipping outliers—capped to a human-reviewable cadence.
Overhead allocation
Spread fixed monthly overhead (rent, utilities, software, salaries) across SKUs so the profitability dashboard shows fully-loaded margin.
Setting up the ShipWave mobile picker app
Install the PWA on any phone or tablet, sign in with a PIN, and start picking, packing, or counting in under five minutes.
Bin management and warehouse layout
Build out your aisle, shelf, and bin structure once—then let ShipWave route pickers down the shortest path automatically.
The mobile pick workflow
Scan bin, scan SKU, confirm quantity, move on. The mobile app guides pickers through each line and catches every mismatch.
Scan-to-verify pack stations
Stop labels from going on the wrong box. Every pack scan is verified against the pick, and label purchase is blocked until pack is clean.
Cycle counting with blind counts
Define count zones, schedule them on a rotation, and let counters verify quantities without seeing the expected number.
Lot and serial number tracking
Track expiry dates, run recall workflows, and pick units in FEFO order with built-in GS1-128 barcode parsing.
DDP and landed-cost shipping with Zonos
Show international customers a single all-in price at checkout—duties, taxes, and fees paid upfront, no surprises at the door.
Configuring DDP and broker accounts
Plug in your Zonos key, link your UPS/FedEx/DHL brokers, and pick DDP-eligible countries country-by-country.
Adding the landed-cost widget to Shopify
Drop a single script tag into your theme and shoppers see real-time DDP duties and taxes right in the cart.
DDP refunds and reconciliation
When a customer returns a DDP order, duties are refunded back to you. The reconciliation cron catches drift before it adds up.
Shipping electric scooters and e-bikes (lithium batteries, UN3556)
A scooter with its battery installed is dangerous goods. Here is how to classify, label, and document it—and why it is UN3556, not UN3481.
Returns portal: QR labels and auto-disposition
A self-service returns experience for your customers, plus rules that decide what happens to each item the moment it lands on your dock.
Automation rules v2: nested conditions and simulation
A rebuilt rules engine with 11 new conditions, 9 new actions, nested AND/OR groups, and a simulator that shows exactly which orders would match before you save.
Demand forecasting and reorder points
A nightly forecast that predicts when each SKU will stock out and one-click drafts the purchase order to keep it on the shelf.
Cross-sell on your tracking page
Turn the most-visited page in your customer journey into a quiet revenue channel with rules-based product recommendations.
Nightly carrier manifest automation
End-of-day SCAN forms for USPS and End-of-Day documents for UPS, generated automatically per warehouse so your driver always has what they need.
USPS Cubic, Connect Local, and Ground Advantage Regional
Three USPS commercial programs that can save 15-40% on the right packages—and how ShipWave surfaces eligibility automatically at rate time.
Reusable marketplace listing templates
Define a title, description, and bullets once with variables for the parts that change, then bulk-apply across hundreds of listings per channel.
Post-purchase review requests
Trigger review requests at the moment customers are most likely to write one—just after delivery—through Shopify, Amazon, or your own product review tool.
Abandoned cart recovery emails
A three-stage cadence that converts roughly 10-15% of abandoned Shopify checkouts back into orders, with discount codes saved for the third nudge.
Win-back campaigns for lapsed customers
A simple template and an automated send to anyone who hasn't ordered in 90 days—low-effort revenue from customers you already have.
Crowdfunding CSV import
Bring in 5,000 BackerKit or Kickstarter rows in a single click—ShipWave detects the format, maps the columns, and commits in batches.
Subscription plans and what they unlock
Five tiers from Free to Enterprise, with monthly label allowances and feature gates that scale as you grow.
Usage metering and limits
How ShipWave tracks labels, API calls, and storage against your plan, what counts, and what doesn't.
Address verification API
A standalone API for verifying, batch-verifying, and parsing addresses, with metered billing and a generous free tier.
Regional carriers: OnTrac, LaserShip, Veho, LSO, Spee-Dee, GLS, CDL
Seven regional carriers integrated through ShipWave, with coverage maps, auto-displayed savings against UPS/FedEx, and per-carrier visibility toggles.
Public claim filing portal for customers
A standalone page customers can use to file a lost-package or damaged-package claim, with photo upload and direct insurance follow-up.
Auto-insurance rules: never ship a high-value order uninsured
Set a dollar threshold and ShipWave automatically adds EasyPost insurance to every label above it, so a single porch theft doesn't cost you the shipment.
Connecting Mirakl-powered marketplaces
Use one ShipWave adapter to sell on Tesco UK, B&Q, Argos, Walmart.fr, Fnac, and dozens of other Mirakl operators.
Connecting Allegro
Connect Poland's #1 marketplace and reach ~200M monthly visitors via OAuth2.
Connecting Bol.com
Connect the #1 marketplace in the Netherlands and Belgium via OAuth2 client credentials.
Connecting Cdiscount
Connect France's #2 marketplace using your seller username and password.
Connecting Otto.de
Connect Germany's #2 marketplace with OAuth2 client credentials and auto-subscribed webhooks.
Connecting Kaufland Global Marketplace
Sell on 14 European storefronts (DE, AT, SK, CZ, PL, HR, RO, BG, EE, HU, LV, LT, SI, MK) from one ShipWave account.