Cold-chain shipping is hard. You have to balance the expense of shipping heavy and perishable orders with the risk of it arriving thawed. 

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The worse case scenario is you ship an expensive package to a customer only for it to arrive thawed and in need of replacement. The customer is upset and you bear the cost of another expensive shipment. 

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Unfortunately the lack of advanced automation to help cold chain shippers means that most cold-chain shipments use overly expensive shipping services and excessive packing materials to minimize the risk of a shipment needing to be replaced.  

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This has two negative implications:

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1. Lost time.  It takes your team longer to fulfill each order because they have to decide on what packing materials to use, how much dry ice to use, and what shipping service to use. 

2. You pay more for shipping than you need to because of the excess packing materials and expensive shipping service used. 

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But, because there is no better option, your team is stuck with creating spreadsheets that define rules about when to use what shipping service and how much packing materials.  

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These rules may not be perfect, but it simplifies the fulfillment process and does an okay job of getting orders delivered without too many thawing in transit. 

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That changes today.  

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On October 2nd, 2023 String officially launched String or Cold-Chain!  String for Cold-Chain has two goals. 

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1. Help shippers simplify the cold-chain fulfillment process.

2. Help shippers save money on shipping without sacrificing freshness on delivery.

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To do this, String automatically determines the lowest cost method to ship something to a customer without the frozen items in the order thawing. String creates multiple shipping options that will arrive fresh and compares each one to determine the lowest cost.

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This is important because sometimes a 1 day shipment with only 5 lbs of dry ice will cost less than a 3 day shipment with 15 pounds of dry ice.  String takes into account the cost of the packing materials and the shipping service to determine the absolute lowest cost delivery method.  

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String removes the complexity from configuring cold-chain shipments so all you have to do is print shipping labels and a packing slip. 

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If you want to find out how much you can save by using String, visit www.meetstring.com/shipping-test for a completely free test that will show you how much you can save by integrating String into your ShipStation account. 

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