In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by David Boyer, Country Manager, ANZ from cloud-based shipping automation solution, ShipStation and Brian Nguyen who is a Director at fast-fashion label Lioness.
We are thrilled to partner with ShipStation to bring you this episode. If you haven’t heard of, or used ShipStation before, they automate the fulfilment and return process for hundreds of thousands of eCommerce stores by integrating into over a hundred selling channels, 40 carriers and one hundred tangent eCommerce solutions. Many of the integrations you would have experience with, or have heard from on Add to Cart, including Shopify, Sendle and Amazon.
Lioness, put the fast in fast fashion and they use ShipStation to prioritise their fulfilment queue, sort out split shipping and help facilitate pre-orders. Their results so far have been amazing, with increased dispatch speed and processing speed of 50% since implementing ShipStation. Today, Brian takes us a little bit deeper into how they’ve set up their processes to deliver an amazing customer fulfilment experience and optimise processes for their eCommerce business.
“We’re a set of power tools to help businesses become really efficient at getting their order to their customers”
David Boyer
Questions answered in this episode include…
- What role does ShipStation play in taking fulfilment to the next level?
- Why has Lioness placed a big focus on automating a fast fulfilment process?
- How has Lioness navigated the fulfilment challenges related to pre-orders?
SPECIAL OFFER
Add To Cart listeners get a 30-day free ShipStation trial with 3 months free of ShipStation. Simply use the code “addtocart” over at ShipStation by November 1st 2021 to redeem it.
Transparency is key
(David) “What is a good fulfilment receiving experience? From a consumer perspective if any one of the three of us were to buy something. Then there’s the one actually doing the delivery, so the delivering experience. And so from a consumer, customer perspective, I think right now the most important thing for me to have a good experience is transparency, number one, right?
I need to know what your shipping policy is, what the transit times are, what providers you’re using. Some recent polling that we did at ShipStation indicates that the impact of a bad experience for shipping, a delay or didn’t arrive on time, et cetera, is actually negatively impacting the consumer’s impression of the retailer over that of the carrier in particular, right?
So, as a retailer, how can you get ahead of that and actually be transparent about policies or delays, so that brand tarnish can be mitigated?
Rolling out behind the scenes
(Brian) “Once you’re a customer, you’ve picked your items, you’ve picked your fashion, your styles, and you’ve checked out, what happens behind the scenes of what starts rolling out is this beautiful piece of ShipStation sort of automation. Tags are floating through from Shopify to ShipStation. And then that sort of starts simplifying or re-routing or cohorting that data of orders so that we can service that customer, whether it’s pre-orders coming up, pre-orders being put on hold, it’s same-day delivery is going up today.
And so there’s always little moving pieces. And if you’re getting 200 orders a day, how are you going to do that? It can’t just be an order queue. It has to be something sensible that we’re able to interface with and work with to be able to bring those orders through to us in a way that we can manage it.”
Go on plenty of dates
(David) “I think Brian and Lioness are a really great example of this, that businesses should be looking for consultative approaches to their partnerships, right? Or partners that offer a consultative approach and asking the questions around, “How can we put things in place today that’ll help us two years from now? Three years from now?”
So that would be my advice for businesses, retailers looking across the platforms and the integrations, find a platform partner that suits your business requirements. Know your business, know how to select the right partner, go on plenty of dates, et cetera. And then, yeah, asking questions like, “Hey, two years from now, where are you guys headed? Are we in this for the long haul?” And then, marrying up with the ones that have a similar vision to yours.”
Links from the episode:
- ShipStation
- Lioness
- ShipStation x Lioness Case Study
- ShipStation x Shopify Plus The Ultimate Shipping Guide
- ShipStation x Sendle The Small Business Guide to Efficient Shipping
- ShipStation Global Pulse Research Study
This episode was brought to you by…
