Make shipping packages easy with shipping integrations in EBMS!
This episode is part of an ongoing video series demonstrating tips, tricks, and features to help you get the most out of Eagle Business Management Software. In today's video, Nathaniel uncovers estimating, rate shopping, and shipment tracking within EBMS.
This video covers -
- Packaging Shipments
- Shipping Carrier Integrations
- Shipping Methods & Estimating
- Rate Shopping
- Label Printing & Package Tracking
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Video Transcript
"Hello and welcome to another episode of our EBMS Insider Series. This is a regular video series we do to demonstrate tips tricks highlight features and provide other information to help you get the most out of your software. My name is Nathaniel Gingrich. I'm the Chief Product Officer of Eagle Business Software and in this episode we'll be spending time looking at the powerful shipping and tracking features built into EBMS. The features we'll be looking at are available in EBMS 8.4. Over the past few years partial shipping has been on the increase and that's true for many of our clients as well. EBMS has integrated shipping capabilities which allows users to estimate, rate shop, and track directly from EBMS. Some of the EBMS feature highlights that we're going to look at today are shipping estimates, rate shopping, label printing, the tracking information that we get, and then generating return labels. What are some of the reasons why we manage shipments from within EBMS? What allows you to get real-time shipping estimates from the website or while taking a call? You might want to rate shop among a variety of carriers or services to find the best deal. And then of course it's how easily you can print or even reprint a shipping label. And finally you have those tracking numbers available to you on the invoices, emails you may send out, or even on the customer portal. There are a few other items to note with this shipping integration. First of all dimensional weights are supported to handle your odd size packages. We also do address validation to make sure your carrier is going to be able to deliver to the address you intend, and we support COD shipments, and there's such things as handling, fees specialty fees per product, and so on that can be built into the shipping price. A couple notables: This is for packages only not LTL, and we only support domestic shipments within country, so U.S. address to U.S. address or canadian address to canadian address. And as EBMS is currently designed only one shipment can be made per invoice. This integration supports all your favorite carriers such as USPS, Fedex, UPS, and DHL. And for our canadian clients it supports Pure Later, Canpar, and Canada Post. So let's talk about how we get this set up and working within EBMS. The first step is to go to shipengine.com and set up an account. You'll also set up the carriers. You'll get an API key which you'll plug into EBMS and then for each carrier and service type you'll set up a shipping method within EBMS. And finally you'll go to each product and enter the weight of that product or the dimensional weight so that we get accurate estimates. Setting up the connection to shipengine is super easy. Go to sales > options, and the shipping manager tab. From there click on shipengine > properties, and you'll be able to enter in the shipengine url and API key as well as decide whether or not you want to automatically validate addresses or not. Now that you have the connection with shipengine in place you're able to start setting up the shipping methods. So go to sales > options > and the shipping methods tab. From there create a new shipping method with a rate type of shipengine. Click on the preferences button and you'll load a list of the carriers and the service types that are activated within shipengine. To get good estimates we'll need to enter accurate weight information. To do so, go to a product > the shipping tab, and down at the bottom you'll be able to enter the package weight and the dimensional weights for each unit of measure. Now that we have the connection with ship engine and good weight information on the product, we can open a sales order or a proposal, enter product in there and choose estimate shipping. EBMS will send all the necessary information to ship engine which will come back with the shipping rate. If you wish to know all the parameters and factors that went into that calculation, you can go to view > freight explanation and see the details of how that rate was calculated. When you're ready to package the product you'll open the sales order and go to the shipping tab. From there choose the packages button and in the dialog that appears enter in the actual package dimensions. Once you've entered all the packages and their dimensions you're ready to rate shop all packages. Here you're presented with all the shipping methods that are available for this shipment. Once you've picked the shipping method you wish to use it's as simple as selecting the correct printer and choosing the print button. As soon as a shipping label is printed shipengine will send back the tracking number, ETA date and other information about the shipment which is stored and available right there on the shipping tab within the sales order. Tracking packages is super easy from the sales order or for your customer as a printed invoice or a .pdf invoice embedded into the body of an email being sent out with autosend. They can also access it by logging into the customer portal and seeing the status of their shipment. There's a lot more to discover regarding our integration with shipengine and the shipping features within EBMS. Visit our knowledge base at info.egobusinesssoftware.com and there search for the keyword 'shipengine' and you'll discover more of how to set up, configure, and benefit from the integrated shipping experience within EBMS. Thank you for watching! visit info.egobusinesssoftware.com/support/insider to access all of the EBMS insider episodes. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us and be sure to check back next month for another EBMS insider episode."