Meet the company: Zenstores

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Zenstores started out as self built solution to connect eBay, Amazon and the best delivery networks to save time dispatching orders by eliminating the cutting and pasting of addresses for labels. It worked because the founders were real online sellers solving a real problem and when Zenstores Dispatch was offered as a commercial product online retailers flocked to sign up.

Zenstores have just released their new Zenstores Insights product so it seemed like a good time to catch up with the guys and here’s what they had to say:

What does Zenstores do?

Zenstores is a platform built to propel online sellers to ecommerce greatness. Until last week that meant providing simple but powerful order management and shipping software, but we’ve now also launched a free sales dashboard that gives sellers the ability to identify the products, channels and customers that are driving their growth.

Our shipping product is now known as Zenstores Dispatch and our sales dashboard is called Zenstores Insights. They’re available as independent products or they can be used alongside each other.

Tell us a bit more about Zenstores Dispatch and Zenstores Insights

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Zenstores Dispatch connects an online seller’s stores to their couriers, giving them one up to date order list, from which they can book shipments, print delivery labels, send invoices and dispatch orders with tracking information.

It’s one of the simplest ways to generate Royal Mail’s 2D barcode labels and cuts out the time and frustration of having to manually import delivery addresses from multiple stores into courier interfaces.

zenstores-insights-bar
Zenstores Insights is a totally different beast. It’s a powerful sales dashboard that acts as a live healthcheck of a seller’s online business. Sellers can quickly react to sudden drops in sales and isolate any poor-performing areas of their business. It also makes it easy to instantly identify the channels, products and customers that are driving an ecommerce business’ growth.

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Why would someone use Zenstores over competitors?

Our goal is to build a family of products that solve the most critical problems faced by online sellers. First we tackled the time-intensive dispatch process, and now we’re making it easy for sellers to access and understand the sales data that’s critical to growing their business sustainably.

We don’t bundle loads of irrelevant features into one bloated monthly subscription, our users can pick and choose what they want to access and pay for. Zenstores Dispatch and Insights are priced separately and available independently, which gives sellers choice.

Customer support is also a genuine point of difference for us. We understand that no two ecommerce businesses are the same and that means as a software provider we need to be flexible enough to adapt to customer needs. We pride ourselves on giving every question and support request a timely, helpful response and demonstrating flexibility when solving customer problems.

Most importantly, our software works. It’s quick and easy to get set up and it’s incredibly reliable.

What would your ideal customer look like?

If you’re shipping between 200 and 15,000 orders per month, Zenstores Dispatch is the ideal way to cut down the time you spend printing delivery labels and updating channels every day. The vast majority of our customers save at least an hour a day, and in a job where there aren’t enough of those in a day, that makes a big difference.

Zenstores Insights is for any online seller who wants to keep track of their sales trends across all channels and get concrete answers to critical questions such as ‘How do my eBay sales stack up against Amazon?’, ‘What are my best-selling products?’, or ‘How many of my customers are returning customers?’

Which platforms do you support or integrate with?

On the stores side we integrate with Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce.

In terms of couriers we have direct integrations with APC, MyHermes, Royal Mail and Yodel. DPD and Parcelforce are also very close to going live.

Any announcements, strategies, or upcoming product releases this year or next?

Zenstores Insights has only recently launched, so a good deal of our resources in the short-term will be focused on making that product even more useful for sellers, while continuing to develop the functionality and compatibility of Zenstores Dispatch.

Beyond that we have some interesting ideas for what other areas of a seller’s business we can help with. We’re currently in consultation with a number of our users to make sure any product decisions are shaped by the real-life needs of our customers, so you can expect news of further additions to the Zenstores platform before too long.

What else would you like to tell Tamebay’s readers?

I’d like to say thank you for reading this far, and wish everyone the best for the Christmas madness that’s already in full flow. Having run an ecommerce business myself I know how easy it is to let your store take over every aspect of your life, so my wish would be for everyone to find the time to kick back and relax for at least a moment this year!

4 Responses

  1. We’ve been using Zenstores since about May.

    Perfect solution for dispatching, would be even better if they had inventory management.

  2. £150 a month for an inventory of our size.

    Why not make it £500 or £1000. Why don’t I just give you my wallet?

    There are thousands of hard working business people out there, working long hours, who are being milked by “solutions” promising the earth and delivering nothing.

    Tried several ourselves over the years before wising up.

    Far easier to take money off small businesses than to go out there and graft for themselves.

    Whether you benefit or not, they always get paid – by YOU

  3. This is one of the genuinely useful solutions for people who sell on eBay/Amazon and use APC/Yodel etc. We have used it for over a year, and for our type of products the cost is reasonable.

    Orders all come into one place, you select which ones you want to send by which courier, the software books the parcel with the courier and prints the labels and pick list, then when you’re ready to dispatch click another button and the tracking numbers are sent to the marketplaces/or your website – simple but powerful.

  4. Best thing thats happened for me in 2016 ! Great product saves me loads of time , All orders consolidated , Royal Mail labels printed and marked as despatched with any tracking numbers noted. Will be especially useful when the new Royal Mail 2D barcodes go live in 2017 . A cracking product 🙂

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