AfterShip vs Linnworks

AfterShip is a post-purchase platform for ecommerce brands, started in Hong Kong around 2011 to 2012 by Teddy Chan, Andrew Chan and Dante Tsang after Teddy built a script to cut where-is-my-order emails in his own store. It raised a $66M Series B led by Tiger Global in 2021. Its core job is keeping shoppers informed after checkout and reducing support tickets about deliveries, returns and delays.

The suite is sold as separate products: Tracking (branded tracking pages, delivery notifications, estimated delivery dates and analytics across 1,300+ carriers), Returns (self-serve returns and exchanges), Shipping (label printing and rate comparison), Protection (shipping insurance), plus personalization and warranty tools. AI features and an MCP server give assistants read access to shipment and return data. Each product has its own tiers, and the Shopify App Store versions are priced differently from direct plans.

AfterShip fits Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce brands that ship thousands of orders a year and want to turn tracking emails and pages into a marketing channel. Brands mainly needing cheap labels should look at Shippo, Easyship or ShipStation, and EU merchants often pick Sendcloud.

Buying tip: in mid-2026 AfterShip cut its direct Tracking plans from four to three, renamed Pro to Premium at $59 a month billed yearly, and moved to annual shipment quotas (6,000 a year on both paid tiers). API and webhooks start on Premium. On Shopify, compare the app's own plans, which include a free tier for 50 shipments a month.

Linnworks is a commerce operations platform for brands and retailers that sell on several marketplaces and webstores at once. The company was founded in 2005 in Chichester, England, and in September 2022 it acquired SkuVault, a warehouse management system from Louisville, Kentucky, with Marlin Equity Partners as majority owner of the combined business. Its core job is to keep stock, orders and listings in sync so that a sale on Amazon reduces available stock on eBay, Shopify and TikTok Shop right after the order lands.

The platform covers rules-based order routing, carrier labels and tracking, bulk listing edits, warehouse picking and packing, forecasting and SKU reporting. Linnworks lists 100+ native channels, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Etsy, Temu, Shein, Wayfair and Allegro, plus more through its app store. Pricing is quote-based and tiered by monthly order volume with overage charges, never a percentage of revenue. Add-ons such as Forecasting and Conjura analytics are sold separately, and every package carries a one-off onboarding fee.

Linnworks fits sellers shipping hundreds to tens of thousands of orders a month across many channels, often from several warehouses or 3PLs. It is overkill for a single Shopify store. ShipStation is cheaper if you mainly need labels, while Cin7 adds deeper inventory accounting and B2B features.

Buying tip: count your peak-season orders, not your average month, because overage fees apply when you exceed the tier. SkuVault Core is only sold in North America, so sellers elsewhere use the Linnworks WMS option.