ShipHero has distributed teams that are located in the US and Argentina. As we’ve grown, we’ve also evolved how we communicate and track tasks.
We share some of our tools and practices with the team at Daxx as we discuss how our teams stay connected and productive.
After coming up empty handed when searching online for affordable, stylish clothes in a range of sizes, stay-at-home mom Leslie Hall decided to create her own boutique. Shortly after she started filling a 10×10 room in her home with choice inventory, demand for her products quickly soared.
Turned out, countless women just like Hall were eager to find the exact same thing.
In less than four years, ZigZag Stripe exploded and now boasts a proper warehouse facility, three brick-and-mortar stores, and fifty employees. Still family owned and operated, the now-multimillion dollar company has gained a reputation for its fashionable, American-made pieces that flatter a variety of body types.
Of course, it’s due to this reputation that ZigZag’s customers are regular and avid shoppers, many purchasing products multiple times a week. Initially, the growing business had difficulty tracking these orders and often sent them out individually. Using paper print-outs, different warehouse staff would sift through the stock – much of which would be dwindling quickly due to the high demand – and ship each item separately to the same customer’s home. The result, of course, was wasted time and money.
After a particularly harrowing period when the warehouse team struggled to fulfill a huge influx of unexpected orders, ZigZag Stripe decided to use the ShipHero platform. The first day that they used it, they got 200 additional orders out the door. And within the first month, they no longer had the usual fifty or so erroneous orders that resulted from typical human error.
But, the feature that really sealed the deal was the “merge” function.
Now, when customers placed multiple orders in a short timeframe, ShipHero merged them into one. All warehouse staff had access to real-time status of all these orders, so no extraneous shipments were made. And, the warehouse team were able to find the lowest shipping rate for one shipment instead of multiple. As the manager of operations, noted: for a company with a “cult-like following,” the merge function “has made a world of difference.”
The merge function is just one of the many groundbreaking features that ShipHero uses to help growing businesses fulfill orders and save money on shipments. To learn more about how our platform can address your e-commerce company’s unique needs, please contact us.
Introducing the ShipHero weekly shipping trends report. ShipHero provides warehouse management software and outsourced ecommerce fulfillment to over 4,000 brands, processing an annual gross merchandise volume (GMV) of over $5 billion.
In an effort to provide useful data to the DTC community during Covid and the rapid changes occurring in our industry, we are sharing some of the broad segment trends from the products on our platform. Here is the data for the week ended November 16, 2020:
More charts available on data.shiphero.com.
Do you find this information useful? Let us know! Twitter: @weareshiphero or Email al@shiphero.com.
Originally posted on Home Business Magazine
Small business owners are faced with a difficult decision when it comes to reaching a larger audience online: either they can invest valuable resources in marketing in order to drive customers to their ecommerce store, or they can opt to sell on marketplaces where customers go already.
There are several marketplaces that retailers can utilize in order to reach new customers and increase their online sales. These range from targeted niche platforms such as Jane or Etsy, to all-encompassing behemoths such as Amazon, Walmart and even Ebay. While most of us are aware of Amazon and Walmart’s online presence, Amazon undeniably dominates ecommerce. However, Walmart has been investing millions to improve it’s online marketplace and is the most likely outlet to compete for Amazon’s clients. Still, many retailers default to using the Amazon marketplace without considering Walmart as a viable option to sell their goods.
However, there are several downsides to going this route. Amazon not only charges the retailer to list the items (unless the seller plans to post fewer than 40 listings), but they also take a percentage from every sale made. These costs can quickly add up, especially if a seller lists a large number of products on the site.
Another drawback is the issue of returns. Amazon makes a profit just from the items being listed and sold, so if a customer returns an item, it is at no cost or loss to Amazon. Amazon has built an experience aimed at the customer, not the seller, making it difficult for sellers to manage customer expectations, even when it comes to a returns policy that favors the customer. This means that customers are able to return items months after they purchased them – sometimes for no discernible reason – at the expense of the seller.
Many retailers have also encountered cutthroat competitors on Amazon, who often resort to a myriad of unscrupulous practices in order to derail others successfully selling similar products. These range from posting bogus negative reviews to undercutting a competitor on price by offering counterfeit items. These practices run rampant largely because Amazon has such a low barrier to entry into it’s marketplace. Sellers don’t go through any kind of screening process in order to participate, needing merely to sign up prior to listing their products.
These are just a few reasons that many retailers have started to look elsewhere to post their listings – and one viable platform is the revamped Walmart.com. Walmart.com is the third largest internet retailer and it’s ecommerce sales are projected to surge 40% this year. The retailing giant has also spent billions on ecommerce fulfillment centers and boasts over 110 million unique visits a month. And, many retailers will find that the Walmart marketplace is simply a better place to sell their products. Here’s why:
Admittedly, the Walmart audience doesn’t entirely overlap with Amazon’s. Depending on your product, this can be the determining factor for whether or not you use Amazon’s marketplace to sell your items or opt for affiliating with Walmart. However, retailers whose products are buried under thousands of competing products will find the newcomer’s space amenable to increased sales and reduced competition.
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