Written on a packing bench
Nobody sat in a meeting and decided the market needed another despatch tool. This was written by people who had spent years using packing software that could not do the one thing they needed, on the days when fifty parcels had to go out before the collection.
- Store
- BigCommerce, with Shopify next
- Carrier
- Royal Mail Click and Drop
- Printers
- Zebra and Citizen thermal
- Benches
- Any Windows PC
Other carriers. Accounting. Picking routes. Left out because despatch had to be correct first. Stock control, delivery dates, returns and order support come as separate modules, each when it is ready.
The problem it was written for
A customer orders three things. Two are on the shelf and one is not. The box goes out with two of them, and now somebody has to tell the store exactly which two, with the tracking number for that particular box, while leaving the third item open so the customer is not told it has shipped.
Every tool we tried could either print a label or manage stock. None could answer that one question. So the answer was typed in by hand, order by order, in the busiest weeks of the year, by people who had better things to do at four in the afternoon.
Why that matters to how it is built
Everything awkward on this website is something that actually happened to us, usually at the worst possible moment. A printer that jammed on the second sheet. Two people opening the same order at once. A label bought at Royal Mail while the store never heard about it. A parcel that had to be split across two carrier accounts. An order that must not go out as ordinary stock because part of it is being made to order.
Those are not features from a roadmap. They are afternoons we lost, and the software exists so that nobody loses them again. That is also why it refuses to do certain things: it will not blind retry a carrier, it will not invent a quantity it has not read back from your store, and it will not let two benches ship the same item. Those rules cost money to get wrong, and we know because we got them wrong first.
Who it is for
Anyone selling online through BigCommerce and posting with Royal Mail. It was first built inside a clothing business, but nothing in it is about clothing. If you sell clothing, homeware, parts, prints, food, kit or anything else, and you sometimes send part of an order because the rest is not on the shelf, this was written for your afternoon as much as ours.
It is deliberately narrow, and that is the honest limit of it. BigCommerce and Royal Mail, done properly, rather than twelve platforms and nine carriers done adequately. Shopify is the next platform, and it is being built now.
Who you are dealing with
DispatchThread is a small UK business. When you email, you get the person who wrote the software and who will be packing their own parcels that afternoon, not a ticket queue. That is a real advantage in a busy season, and worth being honest about in a quiet one.
How we sell it
Start free and decide for yourself. Fifty orders a month costs nothing and never expires, which is the only sensible way to judge a despatch tool: on your own awkward orders rather than on somebody else's demo. For a full installation we will want to talk first, because connecting your store, your Royal Mail account and a printer on every bench should not be attempted by someone who has never spoken to you.
Fifty orders a month, free
Free for fifty orders a month, with no card and no end date. Run it beside whatever you use now. It starts read only, so nothing is bought at Royal Mail until you turn it on.