String — About the company
String builds, deploys and maintains the operational automation that runs inside its customers' ShipStation accounts.
String exists for a specific and entirely predictable moment in an operation's life: the point where its fulfillment logic becomes particular to the business, and no horizontal platform can reasonably follow it there. My customers don't log into String. That is the point.
Engineer-led · No dashboard · Maintained by me, indefinitely
String came out of doing this work for individual operations long before it was a company.
An operation would describe a rule that seemed perfectly ordinary to them — this product ships in that box, unless the destination is warm, in which case it ships in a different box with a coolant pack, and the service has to be fast enough that the coolant still means something. Then they would explain that their shipping software could not express it, so somebody checked those orders by hand every morning.
Every operation had a version of that rule. Different products, different constraints, the same shape of problem. And every one of them had been offered the same two answers: absorb it as permanent manual work, or replace the whole stack with a warehouse management system — tens of thousands of dollars and months of retraining to encode what was really a handful of decisions.
This is not a defect in ShipStation. It serves a very large and varied merchant base and has to work for all of them. It cannot reasonably build the temperature threshold that governs your coolant spec, the batching sequence that only makes sense given your pick paths, or the joint cartonization-and-rating decision your rate card actually rewards. No horizontal platform can. That is the honest limit of generic automation, and it is where String begins.
So I built the third answer, and made it the whole company. I take responsibility for the operational logic itself — building it, running it, and keeping it correct as the operation changes — while your team carries on working in the software they already know.
The software is not the product. What I actually sell is the accumulated knowledge of how these operations fail, and how they should be run.
A decision layer that sits above your ShipStation account. It reads each order, makes the decisions your operation would otherwise make by hand, and writes the finished shipment back — before anyone on the floor sees it.
In practice the work falls into four areas. Most operations need some of each, and almost none of them need exactly the same thing.
01
Which carton, whether the order splits, and which service and carrier it goes on — solved as one decision rather than two, because your rate card rewards it that way.
02
Batching that follows your pick paths, holds and releases that follow your inventory, and routing that decides which building an order should ship from.
03
Temperature thresholds, fragility and hazmat handling, packaging that changes with the season and the destination, and the exceptions that currently live in one experienced person's head.
04
The ERP, WMS or inventory system that knows something your shipping platform can't see — read at the moment the decision is being made.
None of it is configured by you, and none of it is a template. Every engagement is built around how one particular warehouse operates.
More detail on the architecture, and what changes on the floor, is on the how it works section of the homepage.
String is deliberately small, and deliberately unglamorous. These are the commitments that decide how the company is run — including the ones that cost me revenue.
01
There is no account layer between you and the person who writes the logic. When a rule needs to change, you describe the change to someone who can make it.
02
New SKUs, new packaging, a renegotiated rate card, a new warehouse. The automation is maintained by me — it never becomes another system your team inherits and slowly stops trusting.
03
Your team keeps working in ShipStation, which they already know. No dashboard, no seats to license, no rules for anyone to configure at six in the evening.
04
If your operation fits inside standard automation, I will tell you to keep using it. If your problem is genuinely warehouse execution, I will tell you it is a WMS problem and that String is the wrong tool.
05
There is no per-shipment pricing and no volume penalty, which means I am never paid more for making your operation less efficient.
06
Nothing is rerouted through String and your ShipStation account stays exactly as it is. I would rather hold a customer because leaving would cost them the expertise, not because leaving would cost them their data.
A short list, because knowing where a firm stops is usually more useful than knowing what it claims to cover.
If your shipping rules can be expressed in ShipStation's own automation, they should be. That is what it is good at, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Labour management, slotting and directed picking across a large building are WMS problems. String makes decisions about orders; it does not run your floor.
There is no product to buy and no seat to license. What I sell is the work, and the ongoing responsibility for keeping it correct. You do get to try it: I build your logic and you run it free for 30 days before deciding anything.
Orders arrive in your account exactly as they do today. String reads them, decides, and writes the finished shipment back. Nothing passes through String first.
I am the engineering team an operation would hire to own its shipping logic, without having to hire an engineering team. Everything else about how String is set up follows from that.
String is a product of DataConstruct Inc., a Canadian company based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I work remotely with fulfillment operations across North America.
Registered office
DataConstruct Inc.Contact
For contractual and data-processing terms, see the terms, privacy policy and data processing agreement.
Start here
Twenty minutes to tell me what your team decides by hand, a ShipStation API key, and I build it. You run it free for 30 days on your real orders, and the 30 days do not start until it is right. If it does not solve the problem, I will tell you.
