Aug 3, 2023 | newsroom
NetSuite is to Finance and IT what ShipHero is to WMS. As a result, NetSuite is used to manage dozens of internal functions that make your business run. However, keeping your warehouse data in sync with your system, giving your customer support team the information they need to resolve customer issues, and keeping your operations running smoothly needs more than a standard WMS.
The ShipHero team is thrilled to announce that they have achieved “Built for NetSuite” status for their WMS solution. The “Built for NetSuite” program recognizes solutions that meet the same level of standards for security, data privacy and overall quality as the solutions offered by NetSuite. ShipHero’s WMS for NetSuite solution is a powerful combination of ShipHero’s WMS, embedded tools within NetSuite, and a real-time two-way integration that moves data between platforms.
Here are the key areas areas where the NetSuite/ShipHero integration really shines:
Visibility
You’ll always know what’s happening in your warehouse with the easy-to-read NetSuite dashboard. NetSuite’s dashboard updates in real time, giving you instant awareness of any delays right when they happen. If an order is flagged or an action is taken on a shipment, that information is immediately captured and displayed, giving you the full story of an item’s delivery status.
Data Sync
Never wonder again if the data you’re seeing is accurate. The NetSuite/ShipHero integration allows data to freely move back and forth keeping your inventory counts accurate and helping you to avoid lengthy financial reconciliations on missed inventory or missing shipments.
More Efficient Processes
ShipHero with NetSuite brings you a fully paperless warehouse management experience, cuts down on error rates and waits for manual updates to show in the system. Plus, we can help you better schedule your workforce, to cut down on the number of overtime shifts. One of the best parts is that ShipHero is one of the easiest WMS to learn. Many of our clients have told us that they can get a brand new employee up and running on the mobile app in 15-20 minutes. No more waiting for your team to get up to speed.
ShipHero & NetSuite
ShipHero clients are already leveraging the NetSuite integration to boost their response time and keep customers happy. As an important player in the eCommerce space, ShipHero is committed to working closely with NetSuite to ensure our clients get maximum value from their customer service interactions.
Additional features of the ShipHero & NetSuite integration include:
- Bi-directional data synchronization
- Products & Kits
- Sales Orders
- Purchase Orders & Transfer Orders
- Inventory Quantities & Locations
- Serial Numbers, Lot codes and Expiration Dates
- Work orders & Assemblies
- Returns Implementation
The integration will also be handled 100% in-house by ShipHero, allowing you to go live in as little as 6 weeks without any third party involvement.
As ShipHero CEO Aaron Rubin says, “We win because of the quality of our software, the features of our software and our support and ops teams. As eCommerce continues to grow as an industry, close collaboration with our software partners is a top priority.”
Get the best warehouse operating system in the business and leverage the power of NetSuite with the backing of ShipHero. Get started now!
About ShipHero
ShipHero is a US based, leading provider of an award-winning cloud-based warehouse operating system that gives online retailers and third-party logistics providers the tools to ship more efficiently anywhere in the world. With more than 6,500 customers located around the globe, ShipHero offers online retailers a suite of services ranging from warehouse management software to outsourced fulfillment as a service. Additionally, ShipHero is the official fulfillment network partner for Shopify, and now has 9 owned and operated warehouses across North America to get our clients’ products to their customers faster.
Jul 10, 2023 | 3PL Warehouse Management, Blog
If you’re lucky enough to build out a successful and enduring SaaS product, chances are you’ll have to deal with technical scaling issues.
An advantage of being in the eCommerce fulfillment space is that large spikes in usage are usually predictable and can be planned for (with a notable exception: pandemics!), so while there are a few spikes throughout the year, there’s one everyone in the space is well aware of: Black Friday & Cyber Monday (Peak Season). From late November up until a day or two before Christmas, usage of our systems spikes by 2-5x.
For ShipHero’s use case, the real-time pressure on our systems is applied from people working at the warehouses and not end-users shopping from their homes (we get hit with that as well, but it comes in at different times so that we can control the flow). We have an advantage over most systems: physical space limits how much can be done simultaneously. You can only fit so many more people in the same warehouse during peak season.
So, how do we avoid having your systems break when they get several times more than their regular traffic? Well, there are a few things we do:
We Break it Ourselves Ahead of Time
We look at spikes in usage throughout the year, use our peakiest days as a reference, and target to comfortably do 2-3x that amount of traffic comfortably. We do that by artificially sending traffic to a non-production set of services, applying pressure to them, and tracking key performance metrics for the service (primarily, ensuring the servers remain healthy and response times don’t suffer).
If something breaks, we know where we have some work to do, and if it works, we go back and apply more pressure until it fails. We want to know when it’s likely to break and how. This is a relatively common practice known as “load testing.”
We also do something often overlooked but have caught issues more than load testing: we scale up our existing production infrastructure beyond what we think we’ll need. So, for example, if we’re usually running 100 AWS EC2 instances for a service at peak hours of the day, we slowly spin up more until we get 500 EC2 instances, all of which process real production customer requests.
If it goes well, customers get a slight performance improvement that day, and we burn through some money. However, when you add capacity, you start to hit service limits that aren’t related to load, the most common ones being the number of concurrent connections to databases and AWS default limits. So what we’d sometimes find is we need to request more IP addresses or a higher quota of elastic load balancer, both specific things to do ahead of time but very stressful and disruptive when in the middle of heavy usage.
We’ve also found that we can continue adding servers, but there are too many concurrent connections to a database at some point, and adding more just flat-out breaks everything.
No Big Changes leading up to Peak Season
What use is stress-testing a system if you make significant changes afterward? Because most of the stress during the busy system is with the humans at the warehouses, we ensure we don’t make any substantial changes to our system after we try to break it. This means no database version upgrades, performance improvements, or new features. With complex systems, it gets tough to predict how even small changes might affect other parts, so we carefully consider any changes in the 6-8 weeks ahead of Black Friday.
We change as little as possible during Peak Season
We make very few meaningful changes ahead of the busy season. We make fewer changes during the most active month. We froze our codebase for a few years and didn’t allow deployments to production. It was a great way to ensure no unexpected changes, but it had the side-effect of accumulating bug fixes and minor improvements for a month or two, which isn’t ideal.
So in 2022 and again this year, we’ve switched to setting an exceptionally high bar to land and roll out any code, but not a complete freeze. That means we expect every single code being produced to have an exhaustive amount of automated tests, manual QA, and a code review by at least two people where one of them is the domain expert, and make all the people involved in the process co-responsible for how it affects production. In practice, it can take a week to roll out something that usually takes hours, but we’re ok with that for a month out of the year. Productivity goes down by a ridiculous amount, but in return, we get productive customers at a time of the year when everyone’s heads down trying to get packages out the door.
We do other things at the organizational level, like having engineers on-call 24/7 to respond to incidents within minutes and hopefully get ahead of any issues before anyone notices.
It’s something we’re constantly improving, we’ve had years of exceptional reliability during peak season, and the only way to keep it that way is to keep making internal processes better all the time.
Martin Albisetti, ShipHero Vice President of Engineering
Jan 31, 2023 | newsroom
AxleHire Launches Last Mile Delivery for ShipHero In California and theTri-state Area with More to Come
EMERYVILLE, CA – AxleHire, an expedited urban last-mile delivery service, announced today that they are now providing a last-mile delivery service for ShipHero, the leading shipping and logistics platform for over 6,500 e-commerce brands and 3PLs. Currently active in multiple markets, including New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Southern California, AxleHire and ShipHero will bring tech-enabled, on-time delivery and a better overall delivery experience to ShipHero’s e-commerce clients and end customers across the tri-state and Southern California areas with plans to expand to additional markets.
AxleHire’s purpose-built technology and crowdsourced driver fleet can easily flex and scale to meet peak demand and support the rapid organic growth of ShipHero’s industry leading fulfillment solution. With AxleHire’s 99% on time delivery rate and real-time customer support, the partnership between ShipHero and AxleHire creates a simple, reliable, and seamless warehouse-to-doorstep solution for eCommerce sellers.
“AxleHire’s next-day and same-day delivery solutions allow us to stabilize costs for our customers, without concern for the expensive surcharges we’ve seen from major national carriers,” said Karen Schwartz, Head of Transportation at ShipHero. “AxleHire will enable us to reduce our dependence on the national carriers, while providing faster and more reliable deliveries. AxleHire’s reliability and commitment to support our vision of being the most trusted leader in the eCommerce fulfillment space.”
“ShipHero’s core value of always doing the right thing for their customers aligns well with AxleHire’s culture and values,” says AxleHire CEO Adam Bryant. “We look forward to partnering with ShipHero to achieve their mission of making it easy for brands and fulfillment providers to ship eCommerce and grow their businesses. It’s a partnership that will allow us to grow and expand together and we hope to be adding new markets in the near future.”
About AxleHire:
AxleHire is an expedited urban last-mile delivery service, providing customers with a superior same and next day delivery experience. AxleHire leverages purpose-built modern technology and a gig driver fleet to drive transformative outcomes that catalyze customers’ brand growth. Logistics teams can now provide a differentiated delivery experience at a competitive cost, overcoming the limitations of legacy delivery providers. AxleHire operates in urban areas across the U.S, enabling high-volume shippers to consistently cater to the rising needs and expectations of their customers.
For more information, please visit axlehire.com.
About ShipHero:
ShipHero is a US based, leading provider of cloud-based eCommerce fulfillment solutions that give online retailers and third-party logistics providers the tools to ship more efficiently anywhere in the world. With more than 6,500 customers located around the globe, ShipHero offers online retailers a suite of services ranging from warehouse management software to outsourced fulfillment as a service. Some notable customers include Momofuku, Depology and On a Mission Skin Care. Additionally, ShipHero is the official fulfillment network partner for Shopify, and is rapidly scaling a network of warehouses throughout the US to meet the growing demands of today’s online retailers.
Oct 26, 2022 | newsroom
The Information selected 50 companies that have the potential to be the most valuable businesses in their categories based on their current revenue, business model, and growth prospects. To build the list, our reporters consulted industry sources and gathered previously undisclosed financial information. We limited the list to startups that had raised less than $100 million in funding or began operations within the last two years.
Read more at The Information
