Since we mentioned Zenstores a few days ago, we’ve heard from a ton of readers who either already use the solution or who have signed up and already love it.
We’ve asked Thomas Palmer, Zenstores CEO, to tell us how they got started and how Zenstores could help your business. Here’s what he had to say:
Zenstores
The days of copy & pasting are over. Zenstores connects eBay, Amazon and the best delivery networks to save you time dispatching orders.
How it started
In 2008 Rob (one of the Zenstores cofounders) and I made the decision to start selling online. We were both unemployed at the time and pursuing work in landscape photography, our goal was to sell prints online in order to fund the photography projects we were both working on.
The plan worked, to a point. We sold on eBay, Amazon and had several Magento stores, the day to day grind of selling online is ridiculous and was a massive drain on time and energy. Pretty soon a normal day consisted of two things Getting orders out of the door and keeping on top of customer enquiries. That was it. There was just two of us and the business grew to a point very quickly where we could not keep up.
The software available to help streamline these tasks was disappointing, expensive and bloated with features that we did not need or already had better more specific tools in place for doing the job. For a small company a simple piece of software to help us manage this demand did not exist. Luckily we both have a background in programming so we started work on solving these problems ourselves and with that the first version of Zenstores was born.
What is our mission?
Starting your own business I think is an amazingly brave thing as you’re breaking away from the norm and deciding to forge your own path. As an online seller you have to deal with a lot, from disputes with buyers to simply keeping on top of shipping your orders each day. Its tough.
Our goal with Zenstores is to help take the strain by providing easy to use software that saves you time on repetitive day to day tasks like dispatching orders. By doing this we hope to give small business owners more time and headspace to focus on what really matters to them.
A customer contacted me recently to thank me saying that since joining Zenstores he now gets home from work one hour earlier each day and because of this he can now spend more time with his children during the week, something that before Zenstores was not possible. This makes me incredibly proud to be a part of something that is having a positive impact on a lot of people’s lives.
What does Zenstores do?
In Zenstores you’ll see a live stream of orders from all of your sales channels, there’s no need to manually import. You can print shipping labels in bulk in a few clicks, as well as customisable invoices, integrated labels and picking and packing slips. You can also mark orders as dispatched and update tracking details for all of your sales channels in bulk.
There are advanced features such as the ability to merge orders with the same address into one shipment. Zenstores also supports integrated labels for Royal mail DMO (As far as we know they’re the only solution capable of this).
Integrations and Support
As well as a host of other features there is support for: eBay; Amazon; Magento and Shopify. Coming soon is support for WooCommerce; Etsy; and OpenCart. Courier support includes: Royal Mail DMO; Royal Mail PPI; myHermes; Yodel; APC; and NetDespatch.
Pricing
A free trial of 100 shipments (with no time limit) is available so that you can give Zenstores a try for shipping orders. Then there are plans including:
- Free All of your orders in one place
- £25 / month ship 5000 orders per month from Zenstores
- £50 / month ship 15,000 orders per month from Zenstores
- Contact Zenstores for pricing 15,000+ shipments per month
12 Responses
We’ve been using Zenstores for the last couple of weeks. We’re using Yodel and APC (through Netdespatch) as our main couriers, it really does save a ton of time when it comes to creating labels and automatically updating shipping info. I can’t recommend this solution highly enough.
Pity the lowest price point is £25/5000 orders per month. Why not do annual fees of say £60 for 1000 orders per year and £120 for 5000 orders per year? This would draw in more SME’s.
As a small online business we wanted to integrate with Royal Mail’s DMO system as cheaply as possible to take advantage of the 2D barcode system and using Zenstores has proved to be cost effective and simple without the need for any new label printers. The system is easy to use and saves us time and effort in processing our Ebay and Amazon orders. Tom and Rob are great – very friendly and helpful with fast response to queries. Highly recommended!
A Simple question…I need to export my orders to Microsoft word from Paypal notification.
Is this feature available with this software as at present I cut and past all my orders from Hotmail to word
Cannot PayPal PrintMaster do this https://www.pppm.co.uk/