How to use ParcelFill

1. What it does

ParcelFill has no window of its own. It puts a small card on the pages you already work in — a ShipStation order, the Yami order list, a Chit Chats shipment — and fills the boxes you would otherwise type by hand.

On a ShipStation order that means the customs declaration, the weight and the size. You type four or five numbers; it writes the rest and checks its own work.

2. Five things to fill in first

Open Settings — the gear on the card — and it opens on Start here, which lists exactly what is still missing on your account. Each row has a button that takes you to the box.

1. The kinds of things you sell. Each one becomes a button on the card. Pressing it writes the customs description, and the HS code and origin country if you have given it them. Nothing works without at least one.
2. How much to declare. A ceiling, not a fixed figure — whichever is lower, the goods or your limit. A $126.90 order under a $100 limit is declared at $100; a $40 order at $40.
3. How you type weight and size. Pounds and ounces, or ounces only. Inches or centimetres. ShipStation's size boxes are always inches, so picking centimetres means you type centimetres and the card converts.
4. The shipping services you use. Tried in order when an order has no service picked. Without any, no label is created.
5. Your usual box and weight. These ship as 1 oz and 1×1×1 in so a migration is not blocked out of the box — but they are real measurements. Left alone, that is what gets declared and printed.

Optional, and not one of the five: in Settings → ShipStation you can choose once what ShipStation's Select Contents, If Undeliverable, Invoice Number, Insurance and Bill duties and taxes to payor of shipping charges should say. Auto Fill then writes them on every order, replacing whatever the order shows, and the card says what it changed. Each one ships as Leave as ShipStation has it, which leaves the field alone.

3. Shipping one order

1. Open the order in ShipStation. The card appears on the right.
2. Check the quantity. The card counts the items itself and asks twice before it believes an answer; if it could not count them, type the number.
3. Press the kind of thing the order contains.
4. Type the weight and the box. If you have shipped the same things before, the card offers what it used last time — press Use to take it. On an order whose Package reads Multi Package in ShipStation, Auto Fill leaves the Weight and Size (in) boxes as they are, since each package is set under Edit Packages, and fills the rest as usual. The label you make for that order is not remembered for next time.
5. Press Auto Fill.

The strip along the bottom of the card says what the order still needs. A grey tick means that part is set; an amber mark means it is not, and the ones that stop a label are marked differently from the ones that merely make the declaration wrong.

ParcelFill checks what it wrote and tells you if anything did not take. It does not click Save for you.

The buttons in the card's corner

The gear is Settings. When the card says a setting is missing — No item types set up yet or No services set — the gear opens Settings on that box, with a line at the top saying why it opened there.

The pin beside the gear is Disable (manual). Press it and the card goes into Manual mode: autofill is off, your item types and Auto Fill cannot be pressed, Auto Fill + Create Label is not offered, the card stops counting the quantity, and you edit ShipStation's fields yourself. A slash across the pin shows the card is paused. Press it again (it is now Enable auto-fill) to turn autofill back on. Until you do, manual mode stays on in that tab, even after you refresh the page.

The icon beside the card's pin is What is on for this page. It puts a list in place of the card's boxes: one row for each thing the card does here — the declared value, self learning, sending back to Yami, the price guard, the address check and the rest — each saying how it is set right now, or that your plan does not include it. Rows you tick in Settings → ShipStation come first, in the order you put them; the rest follow. Choose which rows come first, at the foot of the list, takes you there. Change on a row opens Settings on that row's setting; the plan's row has Manage instead, which opens your account in Settings. Back returns to the card.

4. Letting it buy the label

Auto Fill + Create Label does everything above, waits for the carrier's price to settle, and then buys the label. It appears only once a rate has been quoted.

Before it spends anything it stops twice:

• if the price is above your limit — Settings → ShipStation → ask before an expensive label, which ships at 33 and cannot be switched off;
• if the address is not validated, or the box has no size.

Your own Create + Print Label click is never second-guessed and never automated.

5. The morning batch from Yami

On the Yami seller portal's order list, tick the orders you are shipping. A bar appears at the top with one button per destination: Migrate to ShipStation or Migrate to Chit Chats.

If the bar covers something you need, drag it by its title to anywhere on the page; it opens in the same place next time. Double-click the title to put it back in the corner.

Fill in the Package & customs panel on that bar first — it is the box the whole batch starts from, with a per-order override for anything unusual. Then press Migrate.

While the batch is being read, checked or made, the bar shows Cancel. Pressed before anything is made, it stops with nothing created; pressed while the batch is running, it stops it there, and the orders already made stay made.

If Migrate is set to work over the API rather than on screen, and stops before anything was made — Yami refuses the keys, say, or ShipStation or Chit Chats cannot be checked — the bar offers On screen this time, which migrates the same ticked orders the on-screen way, and Switch to on screen, which does the same and keeps Migrate on screen until you change it back in Settings. Nothing is offered once creating has started, so no order is made twice.

What is created is deliberately unfinished: a ShipStation order is Awaiting Shipment with no label bought, and a Chit Chats shipment is unpaid. You choose the service and buy postage yourself.

Each Yami store can have a usual carrier: in Settings → Yami → Where each Yami store normally ships, pick ShipStation or Chit Chats for your US store and for your Canada store. The bar then puts that carrier's Migrate button first and says so under the buttons. Pressing the other one asks whether to migrate there anyway, and nothing is read or created until you answer Yes. The store is whichever one the Yami portal is showing. Both start at No preference — show both, which leaves the buttons as they are.

Tracking back to Yami

Once a label exists, going back to the Yami order list fills in the shipped quantity and the tracking number for you. You press Yami's Ship button. The number is write-once on Yami — it can never be changed or removed afterwards — so ParcelFill fills it only from a live label, clears it if the label is voided before you press, and blocks the press if what it filled is no longer current.

A Yami account can have a US store and a Canada store, and each order is listed only under its own. ParcelFill remembers which store it saw each order in — on the Yami list, when you migrated it, or through Yami's API — and goes by the ship-to country for one it has never seen. If the Yami tab is on the other store, it does not search there: a note at the top of Yami names the store to switch to, and once you switch, it fills by itself.

6. A Chit Chats shipment

When the Yami migration makes Chit Chats shipments on screen, it stays with each one. Once an order's address is saved, it waits while that shipment's Description and Package pages are open, so you can finish it there, and opens the next order when you have moved past both or closed the dialog.

On the Description step, the card fills the item line from the order behind it — quantity, description, unit value, currency. On a shipment the migration made on screen in this browser, it also writes the Yami order number into Chit Chats' empty Order ID box, and your Save and continue keeps it. A box that already holds something is left alone.

A shipment imported from Shopify arrives with one row per product. The card can combine them into a single line described as the item type you pick. It never presses Save and continue; you do.

Once you save a combined line, Chit Chats has only that one line, so the card keeps the rows it replaced — description, SKU, quantity, unit value and weight — in this browser for a week. Reopen the shipment while it is still that one line and the card lists them, with the date they are kept until. After that week they are deleted, whether you reopened it or not. On the Package step that follows, as on every shipment, the cursor starts in the weight box, so you can type the parcel's weight straight away.

On the Package step it starts your usual package type and units, and empties the weight Chit Chats pre-filled. That figure is the products' weight from the order, not the parcel's, so it is a guess that Save would accept. Empty, Chit Chats refuses to save until somebody weighs the parcel. A weight you typed yourself is never cleared.

Shipping to the United States, Chit Chats asks who made the goods on every row. Fill that in once in Settings and the card writes it onto each.

7. When it says it cannot

Every one of these is the card telling you something is missing rather than something being broken. Open Settings from the gear beside the message and it lands on the box it is about.

8. What it never does

• It never buys a label you did not ask for. One button creates labels, it asks about the price first, and your own Create + Print Label click is never automated.
• It never buys postage on Chit Chats. Shipments are created unpaid so you can see rates before spending credits. There is no purchase in the code at all.
• It never sends your customers' details anywhere. Names, addresses and phone numbers move between your own tabs and are cleared when a migration finishes.
• It never guesses an HS code or a country of origin. Both are statements to a customs authority about your goods. It writes only what you typed.
• It never replaces something already on an order — a description, a country, a service — except where you press a button that says it will.
• Your API keys never leave this browser except to the service they belong to, and they are never readable back out of the settings page.

What is kept, and for how long, is on the privacy page.

Still stuck?

Ask a person Report a bug