Nathan Bush: This episode of the Checkout is brought to you by E Suite. Whether you're a retailer looking to grow your team or you're an E commerce gun looking for your next role, E Suite are here to help. At E Suite, we connect fast growing retailers with the best Australian e commerce talent. We're working with some of the best in the business including Accent Group, Incoo, Aus, Hair and Beauty and Black Mill. So if you are in the market or interested in where the e commerce market is at, reach out. Visit esweettalent.com for all the latest job list or contact me directly on Nathan sweettalent.com au now let's get into today's checkout.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous Add to Cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features David Boyer Anz country manager from cloud based shipping automation solution Shipstation. Shipstation automate the fulfillment and return processes for hundreds of thousands of e commerce stores by integrating over 100 selling channels, 40 carriers and 100 tangent e commerce solutions. Many of the integrations you would have had experience with or you would have
Nathan Bush: heard on the Add to Cart podcast including Shopify, Sendal and Amazon. David, welcome to the Checkout.
Nathan Bush: Five quick questions for our Friday for you.
Nathan Bush: Number one, what is the weirdest thing that you have ever bought online?
David Boyer: I had a hard time thinking about this. I think I'm going to give a different answer. I'll give the weirdest delivery experience I had that really astounded me. My partner and I, we were in Thailand and we had a credit card breach issue. And what surprised me is that I was able to call my bank and then within like three business days I had a credit card show up at the hotel that we were staying for free. And it was, it was that straightforward. And I was so impressed by that. And that's not necessarily weird but like it left such a lasting impression on me that when I ever talk about a delivery experience, that's the first thing that comes to mind because I was like blown away by how on time and perfectly to the address that it arrived.
Nathan Bush: That's brilliant. And some of those addresses aren't easy, right?
David Boyer: Yeah, exactly. It's like I'm surprised they even got it in the right country. Okay, cool.
Nathan Bush: Oh, good stuff. Number two, and this might be putting you into a bit of a corner here. Who is your favorite retailer?
David Boyer: Oh sure, there's so many that are doing Such awesome things with such interesting products. I think I'm a new dad. And so a second you become a dad or like six months before you become a dad, you become an entirely new customer to a whole new cohort of retailers. And so that happened to me and I stumbled upon, not knowing that they're a customer of ours, a customer of shipstations. But subo, SUBO products, they make a really awesome all in one drink cup. Right. Or drink and meal cup that you put things in and it uses like hydraulics to push the food out just through the kids sucking on it. And it's a great. It's a great thing. I recommend it to every parent that does. One wants to have like a mess free meal delivery item that they can quickly rewash. So their delivery experience and site experience is all really great, but really the product is what I love the most.
Nathan Bush: How good are those fines when you just stumble across something and you go, I didn't even know that existed. Yeah, yeah, Someone spent a lot of time thinking about that.
David Boyer: Exactly.
Nathan Bush: Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
David Boyer: Yeah. And there's one in particular that I really, really liked reading very, very recently. It was called what you do is who you are by Ben Horowitz. And it's a business culture book. And I know that there's a ton of resources like that out there, but this one was really unique to me because he takes examples across history. He uses the Haitian revolt two centuries ago or whatnot and Genghis Khan as examples of leaders that built a really impactful culture. Probably not the best cultures, but impactful ones. And they did it very successfully. And he takes the kernels of what made those so successful and. And applies them to business. And so that's anyone building a team, building a business and want to understand how culture is built. This has my strong recommendation.
Nathan Bush: Nice. And are you a physical book reader or an audible book reader or.
David Boyer: I'm not picky. Whatever way I can get the book inexpensively, that's my preference.
Nathan Bush: And as a new dad, is like, whenever you have time to read a book. Yeah, yeah.
David Boyer: I think audiobooks have been a new thing for me to just read, read, read. But now, and I'm doing a lot more audiobooks. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. All right, last one I've got for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is complicated.
David Boyer: I think there are, as the industry continues, maturing and evolving, I think there's going to be no slowdown in the complexity that retailers have to Kind of navigate through. It's a literal ocean of options around technology, platforms, providers, customer expectations. It's, there's no shortage of choice and options. And so navigating that is going to be continually complicated for any business. And so yeah, it's not the most glass half full answer, but I think it's a really realistic one is that things are going to continue to be very complicated, especially as things change post Covid like, you know, and how things might be different. And so I think that retailers need to come to that, know that, that things are going to be complicated and they need to find the right people to help them navigate that and right partners. Right. Technology to help them navigate that.
Nathan Bush: Well, it's an, it's a really interesting perspective from your position as heading up APAC for Shipstation because you're probably seeing people when they have that urgency, when they have so many options available to them and they've got a really complicated process that they're trying to master. So you're probably getting retailers at their most, I don't know, flustered is the wrong word. But when it is at the most complicated.
David Boyer: Yeah, when it's the most painful, I think. Yeah. And so we see, we see that all the time. We talk to retailers that have hit that tipping point. They're like, I need to do something different. Right. And they have the choices and they're like, wow. We also see a very different story where it's someone starting out and they haven't gotten to a painful point but they have analysis paralysis. So they don't know what to do because there's so many choices. And they come to us as a shipping solution and we help guide them as best we can to the different pieces of the E Commerce jigsaw puzzle.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, great. And we did go over this onto our main episode which is available a few weeks ago, around when you are looking for that new solution, how to brief that in and not get overwhelmed by having a huge 300 page brief for your providers. So you shared some great tips in there. So David, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
David Boyer: Yeah, thanks Nathan.
Nathan Bush: This was a pleasure to hear more
Nathan Bush: from David and hear how fulfillment can be automated to take the customer experience to the next level. Jump back into our very special episode 124 where David is joined by Brian Nguyen from Lioness. They were able to increase dispatch speed and processing speed by 50% since implementing ShipStation.
Nathan Bush: Plenty of great tips in there.
Nathan Bush: Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to karma.
