Ordoro Review

5 comments
Updated on: Feb 22, 2016
Review by: Jon Titterington

Date Established: July 2010
Location: Austin, TX

Overview:

Ordoro is a shipping and inventory application for small to medium-sized businesses. Designed for the web, this product is available to subscribers for a monthly fee, under the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Ordoro integrates with USPS, UPS, FedEx, and the Canada Post to quickly generate shipping labels and get your orders out the door. For companies that fulfill their orders through a 3^rd party supplier, there is a built-in feature for dropshipping. Inventory management tools are also included in the higher tiered pricing plans, for anyone who’s looking to consolidate their logistics under one umbrella.

CEO Jagath Narayan created the software while attending grad school at UT Austin, along with three of his classmates. Their mission was, and is, to address the clutter, busywork, and general inefficiency that make backend tasks such a nightmare for companies. Started in 2010, the company remains headquartered in Austin, TX and has grown from nine to seventeen employees since our last review.

Enough background, though. If you’re reading this, you probably want to know if the software is any good, so lets get to it.

Pricing:

The plans are divided into two main categories:

SHIPPING ONLY
- Free
  - 50 orders/month
  - USPS, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post shipping
  - 1 sales channel
  - 1 user
  - Limited email support
- $25/month
  - Unlimited orders
  - USPS, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post shipping
  - USPS best-in-industry rates
  - Unlimited sales channels
  - Unlimited users
  - Unlimited phone/email support
- $75/month
  - Unlimited orders
  - USPS, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post shipping
  - USPS best-in-industry rates
  - Unlimited sales channels
  - Unlimited users
  - Business analytics
  - Quickbooks integration (beta)
  - Unlimited phone/email support
  - Dedicated account executive
SHIPPING + INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
- $99/month
  - 300 orders/month
  - 30,000 SKUs
  - 2 sales channels
  - USPS, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post shipping
  - USPS best-in-industry rates
  - Dropshipping
  - Unlimited users
  - Unlimited phone/email support
- $199/month
  - 700 orders/month
  - 70,000 SKUs
  - 3 sales channels
  - USPS, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post shipping
  - USPS best-in-industry rates
  - Dropshipping
  - Purchase orders
  - Kitting
  - Business analytics
  - Unlimited users
  - Unlimited phone/email support
- $299/month
  - 1,500 orders/month
  - 150,000 SKUs
  - 5 sales channels
  - USPS, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post shipping
  - USPS best-in-industry rates
  - Dropshipping
  - Purchase orders
  - Kitting
  - Business analytics
  - Unlimited users
  - Unlimited phone/email support

All paid plans include:

Free unlimited phone support
Free setup consultation
Unlimited users
Unlimited sales channels
Multi-channel autosync

There’s a free 15-day trial. Credit card info is required, but you aren’t billed until the end of the trial period.

Web-Based or Locally Installed:

The software is accessible via the web. There’s no need to download or install anything.

Hardware and Software Requirements:

The only requirements are a web browser and an Internet connection.

Ease of Use:

The Dashboard

Ordoro’s interface is clean and simple. This doesn’t differentiate it from its competitors a whole lot, but I’ll say that of the shipping solutions I’ve reviewed, this one skews the most towards minimalism. A navigation bar at the top of the page displays the five main tools:

Dashboard: Displays an overview of your account, including sales statistics, shipping costs, and some graphs to visualize how your business is performing.
Orders: Stores all of your orders, with filters for ones that are pending, shipped, and cancelled, along with a dump of everything in the database.
Shipments: Similar to the Orders page. Shows you everything that’s passed into the Shipping process of order fulfillment.
Products: A look at the Inventory side of your business. Shows you your products, along with the current stock stats.
POs: A list of all Purchase Orders.

The workflow is pretty straightforward. During account creation, there’s a wizard that helps you link your account to whatever eCommerce platform(s) you’re using. Once you’ve successfully integrated these sales channels, the software will automatically sync any new orders you receive and push them straight into Ordoro for fulfillment. Likewise, the inventory side of the application will populate with any and all products that are setup on the eCommerce side, along with your current stock figures.

On the orders page, the user can select any pending sales orders (either individually or in bulk), and press the “Begin Processing” button. This will automatically notify the customer that fulfillment is underway. At this point, the selected orders are then moved over to the shipping page where you can create shipping labels and packing slips (again, either individually or in bulk). The process from start to finish is very quick, and only takes a few clicks. I was legitimately surprised at how concise the whole thing was.

The inventory tools work more or less the same as they do on the shipping side of the application. All products are displayed in a vertical grid, and there are filters available for organizing your data (e.g. Low Inventory, Oversold, To Be Shipped, and so on). Options for importing and exporting your inventory are displayed in the top right-hand corner of the page. Exports are done in the CSV format.

Shipments Page

There was definitely more than one occasion where I needed to dig around the help docs in order to figure out how to do something. Kitting isn’t particularly intuitive, for example. However, the documentation is easy to navigate, so it wasn’t like I was beating my head against the desk for hours. After spending just a day with Ordoro, I was very comfortable navigating the interface, and felt like I had a handle on all the major tasks. In terms of its strengths, I think this is Ordoro’s biggest selling point. The application is very, very easy to learn.

Features:

The software offers a host of tools in the following categories:

Shipping
- Download orders from multiple online stores
- Batch shipping – up to 100 orders at once
- Direct integration with USPS, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post
- Compare rates between carriers
- Best-in-industry shipping rates
- Organize orders with tags and filtering
- Tracking numbers automatically sent to customers upon shipment
- Print packing slips with your company logo
- PDF labels that you can print from any computer, on any printer
Dropshipping
- Mark certain items with dropship SKUs to ship from a supplier
- Automatically split orders to dropship from multiple suppliers
- Add suppliers easily
Inventory Management
- Sync your inventory across all your sales channels
- Avoid overselling
- Restock easily by sending purchase orders
- Built-in kitting to bundle products
- Batch supplier setup
- Track on-hand inventory from multiple warehouses
- Track unit costs
- Export inventory data into CSV or QuickBooks
- Link the same product in different online stores to a “Master Product”
Integrations
- Open API

The Dropshipping option is pretty cool, and gets a lot of love from Ordoro enthusiasts. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it’s basically a way to automate fulfillment if you use a 3^rd party supplier for a particular product. Once it’s set up, all you need to do is approve an order and Ordoro handles the rest.

The API is also a great feature. Giving your customers the ability to develop their own integrations is very valuable, in my opinion, and I think an open API shows that a company is looking to the future, and working hard to stay competitive.

Integrations and Add-Ons:

Here’s a list of the solutions that can be integrated with this software:

Sales Channels:

Shippers:

Accounting:

Point-Of-Sale (POS):

Shopify POS

Forecasting:

Inventory Planner

Coming soon:

Customer Service and Technical Support:

Ordoro has great customer service. I never had trouble getting anybody on the phone, and email requests got a response within an hour.

What impressed me most was that when I accidentally charged $99 to my credit card, I put in a request for a refund after support hours had closed. I received a response and a refund twenty minutes later. Again, this happened while the support desk was supposed to be closed. That is above and beyond what I’d expect–a pleasant surprise indeed.

The Knowledge Base is detailed, thorough, and easy to navigate. As I mentioned earlier, there were a few times I needed to look up a specific task; in those cases it never took me more than a minute to find what I was looking for.

I started my career in support, so I pay extra attention to this department when I’m reviewing a company. And while your mileage may vary, I have to say that Ordoro’s team has my seal of approval. Top marks.

Phone: 512.271.9453
Email: info@ordoro.com
Support Center: https://www.ordoro.com/support/
Support Hours: 9am to 6pm CST

Negative Reviews and Complaints:

The Shopify App Store contains a few bad reviews of Ordoro that have been posted within the last year. One of them describes issues using FedEx as a shipping provider:

Ordoro works well as a general platform, and for USPS deliveries we recommend. However if you link your Fedex account be wary that the rates quoted by Ordoro are an ESTIMATE only. What Ordoro tells you that you pay for a Fedex label, and what Fedex actually charge you are two totally different things. From our experience Fedex can charge up to double what is shown when you ‘pay’ for Fedex shipping via Ordoro. This does not seem to be made clear – our impression was that when paying for a label this was the actual cost you pay – but its not the case. Its only a month later when you get your Fedex bill and compare it back to Ordoro do you realize the shipping cost is much higher than expected. Also we were getting charged a new $3 per order ‘pickup’ fee by Fedex via Ordoro for every order which was a surprise and not shown on the label generator or communicated in any way. We ship via a 3PL warehouse and never have this charge when using our Fedex account directly, so to suddenly get these extra charges without any for-warning was a shock as the charges add up quickly. In summary the app works ok, but be very wary when using for Fedex (and probably also UPS) shipments as your costs could skyrocket.
– Curve Surf USA

I spoke to a representative about this. They responded that any rates listed in their application come directly from FedEx. They also said that if there’s a disparity between the rates listed in Ordoro and what FedEx is charging you, then you should contact FedEx and have them make sure your account information is up-to-date on their end. Take that for what it’s worth.

Another Shopify user has some pretty strong words for Ordoro:

Decent idea. Horrible execution. If I could give it -5 stars I would.
This is “simple UI, happy path” shipping software. Which would be great except it doesn’t work. You’re paying for software that intentionally doesn’t have the bells and whistles that shipstation has, [but] an easy interface. The kind of interface that is easy to turn into a mobile app, or navigate on an iphone. However, the decision to write the software using javascript modals means it is completely broken on mobile. So much for happy path.
The decision to make this a javascript browser side app also means that search is painfully slow after you have more than around 500 orders.
Syncing with your shopify store is problematic at best. Orders that are cancelled in shopify sometimes actually cancel in ordoro, other times they don’t. Meaning you have to enter the cancellations twice or risk sending out product that wasn’t paid for.
There is no mechanism to bulk edit the insurance amount, anymore. We sell some items at $105. We have to go through and print the labels on each of them individually or pay an extra $3 per shipment. The kicker here is they actually had this feature and it was working, but they decided to remove it. The removal actually created a horrible bug where every order got insured for the last insurance amount you manually entered. This bug was active on the site for about two months. Are they even testing this software?
And, while we’re talking about insurance. They have the scummiest feature of defaulting you to their insurance provider, no matter how many times you select “carrier insurance.”
No role based access to information — we’re an open company, but there’s a limit to which I want my 3rd party fulfillment center to know my full sales data.
In the end we had to go back to buying every label individually.
And finally, once we decided to switch to a more full featured software package (shipstation), they locked our account as we were over the free limit — never mind that we’d paid for the full month already and had merely opted to not renew. Yet another simple use case they didn’t write the software to handle.
Overall, once you’re bigger than their free tier you’re better off using shipstation. If you try to use it after that point, you’re just accruing technical debt that will come back to bite you eventually.
Go with shipstation. Same price, but actually usable.
– Ketosoy

The complaint about the application suffering speed issues at a certain threshold is a bit troubling. I asked an Ordoro representative about this, and they replied that they have customers processing 5,000 orders/month without any slowdown. I’m a little bit skeptical of that claim, as during my trial I noticed several instances where the app hung, and this was with less than 20 orders.

My only other complaint about Ordoro is that features like kitting and purchase orders, which are pretty basic offerings, aren’t available on the $99/month plan. That’s a lot of money to pay each month without that functionality.

Positive Reviews and Testimonials:

Despite what I just highlighted, there have been a ton of great reviews posted by Ordoro users. You can find dozens by perusing the comments on Shopify’s App Store and the Bigcommerce Marketplace. Here are a few recent ones:

We have been using Ordoro for about one year and we LOVE it. It is easy to use, takes care of all our shipping needs, integrates seamlessly with Shopify and the support has been terrific. When you call them, a REAL person answers and that person KNOWS their product and helps!
We’ve also saved money on shipping – a big plus for an on-line store and been able to offer shipping specials because of it.
The are other shipping apps around and we looked at most of them but we chose Ordoro and are pleased we did. We recommend it!
– Ruth,  EMVI Chocolate
Been using Ordoro for over a year. I don’t even use all of the features but I do use them for shipping and drop shipping. Awesome customer service and a TON of features! Love the branded packing/picking slips and the drop-shipping abilities make our lives here much easier! Definitely worth the heftier price tag.
– The Sweat Store

Security:

The web application employs SSL (Secure Socket Layer) for all web traffic. This means your data is encrypted and secure.

Final Verdict:

I think that in its current iteration, Ordoro is best for small businesses. It’s extremely easy to use–anyone who’s comfortable with a computer will be able to wrap their head around the software in an afternoon. As I stated before, I’m also very taken with the customer service team, which I think is doing an exemplary job.

However, I do wonder how well the application scales when you get to that high order volume. The problem with most SaaS applications is that they usually do well with a small workload, but once you start receiving thousands of orders per month, the constraints of a shared server environment start to rear their ugly head. I will say this: if you’re a high volume business, I don’t think it’s a terrible idea to evaluate Ordoro under their 15-day trial. Setup time is minimal, and the simplicity of the app could be a boon if your company sees a lot of turnover in its employees.

If this review piques your interest at all, you can sign up for the free trial right here. See you next time.

Bio
Latest Posts

Jon Titterington

Writer at Merchant Maverick

Jon Titterington is a writer from Los Angeles, California. He first started working in tech in 2006.

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