Honest Review - PLEASE READ, e-Com Owners
A lot of the reviews on here are not from actual customers! They probably from NextSmartShip staff members and cousins! This is my additional review to my first Review. I have edited my original review from 5 star to 1 star. Because I thought it would be useful to all other e-com businesses who want to use NextSmartShip as a fulfilment centre. I used NextSmartShip for nearly 1 year. At first everything was good. They helped me set my account up and integrated their system with my Shopify Store. This way orders would be pulled out by their system automatically. They gave me a customer service operator who I could get in touch with through WhatsApp. The problems came after a few months when customers started complaining, some did NOT receive their orders, some parcels were damaged and most of the tracking numbers didn't work with Aftership website or 17-Track. You had to manually select the carrier for the tracking numbers to work on these tracking websites. Of course my customers didn’t know who the carriers were. So they’d contact us through our social media pages, email etc and ask why their tracking number was not working. I had to then contact my customer service operator and wait for her response, before I could respond to my customers with a link to their tracking number and where to track them and so on. This caused me so much hassle and extra time. Which could've gone onto focusing on growing my business. Instead I was replying to customer enquiries 24/7 because they thought they might have been scammed. My customer service operator would only work between 8am - 6pm China time. This meant that I had to fix everything before 10am UK time with my customer service operator then contact my customers with the solution. On weekends I couldn’t get in touch because they were off work. Sometimes they didn’t even respond to me. Other times they would get back to me and say they have contacted the carrier and are waiting for a response from them. Then they would forget about that case until I chase them again and again to figure out what was going on. Which would take weeks. Of course my customers don’t know what is going on the backend. They just want their orders. A happy customer would keep coming back to purchase from you. But if they had a bad experience they will never purchase from you again or recommend anyone. Costing your business a customer for life - LTV (Lifetime Value) Which is the most important thing to any business. Because NextSmartShip had all my stock. They pretty much had me by the balls! Customers would open a case through PayPal because their tracking numbers didn’t work (they didn’t know the carrier) then I would go and message the customer explaining why and how they could get it working. Costing me more time and stress. On top of all these issues my fulfilment was not fully automated. By this I mean I had to manually log into NextSmartShip’s backend and fulfil orders myself everyday. Checking the parcels weight, selecting the right carrier and figuring out which carrier is best for which country. If I was not sure about the carrier, I would contact my customer service operator and wait for a response. This would take more time because they didn’t respond till the next day or next week. If I didn’t fulfil orders myself, orders would be left there for days/weeks. My customer service operator who was meant to fulfil orders, gave the job to me and taught me how to do it. This would save them more time to do nothing I guess. Say if I was away on holiday and didn’t have access to the internet or a laptop. I would not be able to fulfil orders. I would probably have to hire a VA (Virtual Assistant) to do this job. This would cost me more money. And hard to scale the business. They market themselves as the cheapest and fastest. This is a total scam. I have found a fulfilment centre who is cheaper and faster. They take care of all the fulfilment packaging and shipping. All tracking numbers work. I just focus on marketing. Orders get fulfilled automatically. And since I have moved to this new fulfilment centre. I haven’t had any customer complaints because all their tracking numbers work and they can see the history. I have got a lot more time now to focus on growing my business instead of doing all the boring work. For these reasons I DON’T recommend NextSmartShip. They still need a lot of improvement, teaching their team about customer lifetime value. Not only they have lost me as a customer but anyone else who is reading this review would not go with them too. They’re not experienced enough to market themselves as a big fulfilment centre.