Starshipit Virtual Assistant: a VA who clears the Unshipped screen before the courier arrives

Nobody adopts Starshipit for fun. You adopt it the week the MyPost Business portal stops coping, usually somewhere around twenty orders a day, when copy-pasting delivery addresses one label at a time has become the worst hour of the morning. And the platform does its job: orders flow in from Shopify or WooCommerce, labels come out in batches, tracking emails send themselves. Then a few months later you notice the hour never actually came back. It changed shape. Someone still has to work the red address flags, close the manifest before the driver turns up, chase the parcel that has not scanned since the Chullora facility, and answer the where is my order emails the tracking notifications were supposed to prevent. That someone is currently you, which is why you searched “starshipit virtual assistant”.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Starshipit

The day starts on the Unshipped orders screen, and the first pass is a reconciliation, not a print run. Overnight orders have synced in from your store, so the VA counts them against the platform: does Starshipit match Shopify, did anything fail to import, is there an order sitting in the store with no shipment against it? Sync failures are rare, but they are silent, and an order that never reached Starshipit never gets a label. Nobody notices until the customer asks, unless checking is somebody’s named morning job.

Next, the flags. Starshipit validates every delivery address against Australia Post’s address data, and the failures sit there in red until a human deals with them. The software’s responsibility ends at flagging. Your VA fixes the obvious ones on the spot, the unit number typed into the street field, the suburb that does not match the postcode, “Sydney” entered as the state, and contacts the customer by email or text for the genuinely broken ones. The difference is a parcel that ships today versus a parcel that comes back return to sender in nine days, having cost you the outbound postage, the return leg and the apology.

Then the batch itself, which by this point should be the easy part, because courier allocation was decided before anyone looked at the orders. That is what Starshipit’s automation rules are for, and writing them well is a genuine skill: anything under 500 grams domestic goes out as a MyPost Business satchel, bulky SKUs route to Aramex, express-shipping orders map to the express product code, and anything addressed to a PO box or Parcel Locker goes Australia Post because the door-to-door networks will not deliver there. The VA selects the day’s orders, prints labels in one run, in pick order if that is how your bench likes them, and hands the stack over.

At each cut-off the day gets closed properly. The eParcel manifest is generated and submitted to Australia Post for contract shippers (MyPost Business skips this step; it charges the moment the label prints), pickups are booked with Aramex or CouriersPlease where you use them, and the paperwork is waiting when the driver arrives. Manifesting is the step tired founders skip at 5:55pm, and it is the step that matters most: an unmanifested parcel is a parcel Australia Post can argue it never received, which is a losing position in every lost-parcel conversation you will ever have.

Afternoons belong to the tracking queue. Starshipit’s branded tracking page and notification emails do real work here, they answer the question before it gets asked for most customers, but the remainder lands in your inbox and it needs a person. Your VA answers those emails against the actual scan events in the Shipped tab, in plain language: where the parcel was last scanned, what the next event should be, when to worry. They also run the queue in the other direction, a regular stalled-parcel pass for anything with no scan movement in a few business days, so the enquiry gets lodged with the courier before the customer has noticed anything is wrong. The full ticket workflow, tone rules and escalation lines live on the customer support page.

Returns run through the same discipline. Requests arriving via Starshipit’s self-service returns portal get approved inside your written policy, return labels are generated on the right service, and the inbound parcel is tracked back so the refund waits for the parcel, not for someone remembering.

If you ship internationally, there is a quieter job underneath all of this: data hygiene. Starshipit generates customs documentation automatically, but the documents are only as good as the customs descriptions, country of origin and tariff codes sitting against your products. A VA keeps that data honest at product level, which is the difference between a DHL Express parcel clearing in a day and one sitting in a customs hold because the declaration says merchandise.

Weekly, the numbers. A Monday summary out of Starshipit’s reporting: shipments by courier, delivery performance, average cost per parcel, plus a rules review whenever the catalogue has changed. That last part matters more than it sounds, and the honest section below explains why.

The honest bit

Four things Starshipit will not do, no matter who you hire to drive it.

It brings no rates of its own. Starshipit is bring-your-own courier accounts: it prints against the MyPost Business tier, eParcel contract or Aramex account you already hold. It is not a reseller, so adopting it does not make a single parcel cheaper. Deciding when your volume justifies moving from MyPost Business to an eParcel contract, or negotiating that contract, is a commercial call the platform will never make and neither will a VA.

Address validation flags problems; it does not fix them. Every red flag still ends with a human contacting a customer, and if nobody owns that job the flags just accumulate while parcels ship to addresses that bounce.

Tracking notifications are only as good as courier scans. Scan gaps happen on every network, and a branded tracking page showing “in transit” for six straight days generates exactly the same anxious email a bare Australia Post page does. Notifications cut the where is my order volume; they do not cut it to zero, and the remainder needs someone who can read a scan history and reply like a person.

And automation rules misfire at the speed of automation. A weight-based rule running against a catalogue where half the product weights in Shopify were never filled in will cheerfully send a week of orders by the wrong service before anyone notices the postage bill. Rules need reviewing every time the catalogue or the courier mix changes. In a well-run account that is a named weekly job, not a hope.

It also will not pick or pack anything. Starshipit moves the paperwork. If the wrong item keeps going in the box, the fix is on the bench, not in the software.

What stays with you

Shipping is not a regulated industry, but the money decisions are still yours, and the split is worth writing down before day one. Courier contracts, rate negotiations and the choice to add or drop a carrier stay with you. Reship-or-refund calls on lost parcels stay with you: the VA lodges the enquiry, tracks the case and drafts the customer reply, and your written thresholds decide what happens without you versus what escalates. Compensation and transit-cover claims get prepared by the VA and authorised by you. And dangerous goods are entirely yours: if you ship perfume, aerosols, nail polish or anything with a lithium battery, the declaration about what is in the box is the shipper’s legal statement, so the VA can flag the SKUs and keep the paperwork tidy, but classification decisions never get delegated.

What it costs and where to start

Starshipit work sits on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. For most stores the shipping run is not a whole role on its own; it anchors a broader one, orders plus the support inbox plus product data, which is why the typical placement is 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month. Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your Starshipit and your store before any solo work, starting with the address flags and the manifest routine. There is a $500 refundable deposit credited to your first month, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice.

If you want the wider picture first, the ecommerce industry page covers the rest of the stack around the shipping desk, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing breakdown with the on-costs comparison. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, and bring your current daily order count and courier mix. She has taken every one of these calls since 2024, and she will tell you straight if your volume is not there yet.