David Boyer: Look at the pain points that you have specifically around dispatching, identify what those are, measure how long it's taking you. Right. And define what fixed looks like or what improved looks like. And then find the platform that can suit that and help you drive towards that.
Brian Nguyen: I waited a few dates with a few different providers.
David Boyer: That's the secret sauce that we offer retailers is we're a set of power tools to help businesses become really efficient at getting their orders to their customers.
Brian Nguyen: So if we're telling you that the pre order is going to arrive in two weeks, how do we make sure that when it does arrive in two weeks? Nathan, your dress is coming out to you right away.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to a very special bonus episode of Add to Cart, which we call the Explainer. This episode is brought to you by one of our partners who make Add to Cart possible. We're going to dive deep into an e commerce topic and unveil the secret tools that leading Australian retailers use to grow.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to a very special and our second Explainer episode of Add to Cart. As always, my name is Nathan Bush, Director at E Suite and host of Add to Cart. And joining me this Wednesday is David Boyer Anz, country Manager 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 and if you haven't heard or used Shipstation before, they automate the fulfillment and return processes for hundreds of thousands of e commerce stores by integrating into over 100 selling channels, 40 carriers and 100 tangent e commerce solutions. Many of the integrations you would have experience with or have heard from on Add to Cart, including Shopify, Sendal and Amazon Lioness. They put the Fast into fast fashion and they use Shipstation to prioritize their fulfillment 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 fulfillment experience and optimize processes for their e commerce business. And if you are impressed by what you hear from David and Brian today, Shipstation has given Add to cart listeners a 30 day free trial with three months free of Shipstation if you sign up in October. Perfect timing. To automate those orders leading into Christmas, simply use the code Add to cart. That's all one word. Add to cart@shipstation.com Add to cart. That's shipstation.com Add to cart using the code add to cart to redeem the offer. So because we don't like to keep our customers waiting, let's get into it. Here's Wednesday's bonus explainer episode with David Boyer from Shipstation and Brian Nguyen from Lioness.
Speaker E: David, we are here to talk about taking your fulfillment to the next level. So that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. From your experience and what you're saying, what does a good fulfillment experience look like to you?
David Boyer: Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think there are two perspectives on that, two ways to look at it. One, from a. What is a good fulfillment receiving experience? Right. From a consumer perspective, if anyone, the three of us were to buy something and 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. Like 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, like a delay or it didn't arrive on time, et cetera, it's actually negatively impacting the consumers 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 that brand tarnish can be mitigated? And I think the second point on that for a good experience for me, for consumers is providing options. Right? So what we saw in 2019, two years ago now it's crazy to think about was that the fast and free was like the same, right? So fast and free, everyone expects that to be fast and free and everything arrives on time, right. There were no major bottlenecks, but what we're seeing in 2020 and now extending into 2021 here locally is that consumers are actually willing to pay and upgrade shipping to express to next day, same day even, right. And they're a lot more willing to opt into that, assuming that it'll arrive on time. Right. Within that time period, because they know the delays now exist. So that's from like the fulfillment experience, receiving from the delivering perspective, it's all about how a business can have a headache less process for getting orders to customers. So obviously, and this is where shipstation fits in, it's about having the right platform, right? So this is where we play a big part. It's either a combination of tools, one tool that help you gain like small iterative efficiencies if you zoom out, big improvements in the fulfillment or the dispatching process. And, and so I guess like to tie it all together by combining both of the good experience. What we actually see is the businesses that have the right approach with both. Right. They cover all bases, they actually have a competitive advantage and they're making delivery the point of differentiation between their competitors, which helps them succeed. Obviously.
Speaker E: It's a really good point. And you've actually brought in one of your retailers who are using the shipstation platform. Welcome, Brian.
Brian Nguyen: Hello. How are you guys going?
Speaker E: Good, good. Now, Brian, you are with yns and so is what David was saying there around transparency and options being real challenges and differentiators for retailers, does that ring true for what you guys are doing as well?
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, I really have to echo David's sentiments there. So he touched on a couple of points. One being the transparency and then also the fact that a lot of times when something goes wrong during the whole shipping process of the flow, even though people are aware that it's a carrier or provider, that's where it's been stuck up. You've got tracking numbers, you've got all those things, you can see that sort of flow. But it comes back onto us and our customer service. And it's really the retailer that's let you down, or it's perceived to be the retailer that's let you down when you've not received something in time, you've not received it in time for that special event that you thought it was. With us, we're a fashion company, so people are wanting our dresses kind of like before the weekend before this party, that sort of thing. So what David said just then is definitely ringing true for our industry. People will pay a little bit on top for things like same day delivery, which is something that we offer. They'll pay a little bit on top to schedule a certain delivery time frame or if there were like split shipping options. So if we sold something pre order and then part of it's actually capable of being fulfilled today, people will pay that little bit of extra to get it today rather than in a month's time or whatever it is.
Speaker E: Yeah, that makes sense. And David, you alluded to it before around your research in the Global Pulse and look, unsurprisingly, a lot of the research said that shipping wasn't slowing down. I think we've seen that recently with some of the headlines, especially leading up to Black Friday Cyber Monday. But what did surprise me is that One of the findings was that half of Australians said they expect brands to to offer free shipping, extended return windows and free returns indefinitely. Now, I'd love to get both of your opinions on whether you think this is realistic for retailers.
David Boyer: I think had you asked that question to us five, ten years ago, it would have been a resounding no. That's completely unrealistic. I think today businesses have a sea of options, like an unlimited amount of options in terms of how to make fulfillment simple, how to make the returns process as simple as it can be. And that's really the expectation now from consumers, thanks to Amazon, thanks to the iconic. Right, is they want a hassle free, straightforward returns process that they don't have to spend time deciphering. Right. It's just they know the policy, it's free, it's simple, it's for X number of days and they can just do it at their leisure. That's the other important thing is they want to do it themselves. They won't have to go go through four different interactions with the customer service agent to get the download or whatever. They just want to take it and download the label and then go drop it off whenever they can at their convenience. So I think the expectation from consumers and businesses needing to adapt to that, I think it's a realistic expectation. And I think there are the tools available in the market for businesses to adapt and add that flexibility and add that simplicity in their return process or return policy as well as just through the options that they offer at checkout. Right. Giving, like I said before, the opportunity for choice or upgrade or downgrade or free or whatever the business strategy is.
Speaker E: Yeah, you're obviously listening to this as a business because you offer free express shipping locally here in Australia for orders of $50 and over and internationally for over $100. That's a really competitive offer and that stands up against some of those leading retailers. So obviously you're meeting customer demands. Is there anything you need to compromise to meet that?
Brian Nguyen: No. Well, I think what it comes down to is just the quality of the consumer engagement with the brand. Right. So there are a lot of options in the market. We're talking about the ability for free shipping, free returns. You're mentioning what our specific policy is to engage with our customers. So I think what really it boils down to is, as a business, how do you want to engage your customer? Do you understand who your customer is and how you need to provide them your service, your product, whatever it might be? And then you take these tools in the market and you sort of create that situation, you create that sort of engagement for them to interact in that way. So for us, like you mentioned, you know, it's free shipping locally over 50. You know, you're not going to find something on our website that's under 50. Pretty much the only reason why it would be under 50 is because it's probably like a final sale item. And so you know, that's quite understandable that if it's a final sale item it's going to cost us more to get out there. But you know, that said, sometimes we might make break even points and might make losses but the reality is what we're looking for is we're looking for strong engagements with our customer. Getting them the fashion that they want at the time they want sort of quickly. Yeah, those are the main things there. And how do we make that sort of work moving parts? It's about partnerships I guess on one side it's obviously the carrier and the providers. We've got Auspost and all those sort of guys out in the market that we can work with. And then on the flip side you've got people like Shipstation here, David. And you know it kind of it marries well, isn't it? It's like how are you putting these pieces together to be able to interact with that customer in that way.
David Boyer: Yeah.
Speaker E: So for those who haven't come across Shipstation or use Shipstation before, Brian, I was going to ask David this question but I'm going to ask Brian because it might be fun to get the retailers view first. Can you tell us how Shipstation fits into your ecosystem of, of how you get products out the door?
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, right. So yeah, look, you know we've run a Shopify site. I think that's pretty obvious. If you do E commerce, you've gone on our site, you've been through the checkout process, you'll know that that's pretty much a Shopify store. Even though our theme is custom, it feels a bit different once you've done that. 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 site's rolling out is this beautiful piece of Shipstation sort of automations tags are flowing through from Shopify to Shipstation and then that sort of starts simplifying or rerouting or cohorting that data of orders so that we can service that customer in that way that we're speaking about. Whether it's pre orders coming up, you know, pre orders being put on hold. It's same day deliveries going out tomorrow or. Well, not tomorrow, today, obviously tomorrow if it's after the 3pm cutoff. So you know, there's always little moving pieces and you know, 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 that those orders through to us in a way that we can manage it. Yeah.
Speaker E: And so did you start with Standard or Shopify? Shopify or Shopify plus and then go. We actually need something more sophisticated, something intelligent behind this to sort those orders out. And then you went into the shipstation solution.
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, so we started with the. Well before that. Right. So six years ago we started as a WooCommerce WordPress site with the WooCommerce plugin. Right. And so as you can imagine it's not too much wrong with that. But in terms of the commerce and the checkout process and the ability to do shipping, we found that there weren't things that we could do or there weren't quite the applications or plugins that we could find that worked well to sell the way we wanted to sell the customers. So you know, we started on another platform first for fulfillment. I mean there are a lot of good sort of providers out there and I encourage everyone to kind of look around. But where we ended up at is that, you know, with the other providers we always got to a certain level and then we always encountered sort of new difficulties or new challenges. Right. And so at some point it just got to the time where. So that it's always a timing piece. Right. Where the way we wanted to sell couldn't be supported on the platforms on the software that we were using at the time. Lucky for us, we were recommended Shipstation and then met David and all that, the rest of the team, and then it just all fit in well at that point.
Speaker E: Beautiful. And David, is that a common scenario of the types of retailers and stages that they get to when they come and start talking to you?
David Boyer: Yeah. Working with Brian and his team was a real fun challenge for us because their model for pre orders was really cool to see and how we were able to help them was really rewarding for us too because now we have a pretty good model that we can talk to other people about with. But yeah, Brian and Linus story is a pretty common kind of conversation that we have with businesses. And Brian's likely heard me tell the story, but it's one that I really, really like. But we, we had a customer, this was six, seven years ago in the U.S. we had a customer that was about to go on the Shark Tank program there. And so they, as you expect, like preparing for Shark Tank, you get all excited, et cetera, et cetera. Make sure you get all your ducks in order. But they went on, they did their pitch right, and they presented to the sharks. It went really, really well. And Mark Cuban engaged with them and wanted to give them a bunch of money. And he was like, hey, I want to invest. I'm all in. And one of his is like, you know, one of the fine prints was, hey, you have to use my fulfillment software. And the customer, to their credit was like. Or our customer was like, no, Mark, with all due respect, we think we got the sorted out. Like we're using Shipstation. Mark was like, all right, all right, sure.
Speaker E: He just said, okay, that's fine.
David Boyer: Yeah, Exactly. That was one word answer. So fast forward six months, 12 months later, right? They did a relaunch. I don't remember the specifics, but they essentially scaled out their business 2x3x right? Over a really short period of time. And they kept Shipstation as that back component, just helping them manage and sort and just do the fulfillment bit, the shipping and the labeling. And I think that's the secret sauce that we offer retailers is we're, we're a set of power tools to help businesses become really efficient at getting their orders to their customers wherever they sell. Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, you know, Wish, Etsy, wherever they're selling Amazon and however they're shipping, right. Whether it's Auspost or Sendal or any other provider, we help them just bridge that all together to make it really seamless and synchronize all the bits.
Speaker E: Beautiful. And we might nerd out. We might get into the nerd out part of this podcast where we actually dive in to David, you mentioned some of those 1 percenters that really make a huge difference in this process. We might nerd out and go into that. But before we do, Brian, the Lioness model is very reliant, from what I've read, on pre orders. And that seems to be a big differentiator in your model. Can you tell us some of the problems that you were coming up against pre orders? Because I think it'd be really interesting for our audience who are either considering pre orders or really struggling with it as well. And what you were coming up against and how you solved that problem.
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, so that's pretty much sort of elaborating on that story that we're speaking about before. In the previous environment, we were finding, well, we were learning, finding our feet in the e commerce world. And basically just one day we realized that how do you pick a winner in terms of a style? Sometimes you can't. You know, you don't know what you do some trend forecasting, you see what people are wearing and you design a range, you think it's all brilliant. But sometimes that one style that's really the winner is the one that surprises you the most. And so what we were finding was that, well, sometimes in a style in a range of 20 to 40 garments, you had one product that was the winner and it was on repeat. On repeat, on repeat, on back order, on pre order. And you don't want to change your store to just sell the one item, but you do want to support the ability to sell that because you wanted to provide that to the market. Basically with that challenge in mind, what we were finding was, well, how do we sell a pre order? It's a unit of inventory that doesn't quite exist yet. We got to the point where we can set a unit against it, but then all those orders are coming through the order queue of our fulfillment software and we had no way of leveraging any sort of tool to differentiate it. Right. And we started off with simple solutions like maybe put pre order in the name, the title of the product, which works. Obviously that sort of stuff works. But when there's a pre order then tick over and become actually a stock in hand. So you just change the title on your website. Is it confusing for the customer? It could be.
Speaker E: So they were just sitting in your order queue, basically blocking everything else?
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, that's right. So If David ordered 20 orders today that were pre order and you were just in the middle of that, I wouldn't find it until I sorted it all out by the end of the day, maybe a few days later, depending on how busy the day was.
Speaker E: Yeah, okay, cool. And so how did you solve that?
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, well, look, initially we did it and that was the problem. Initially we had customer service questions about where the pre orders were at and you can only communicate so well. So we had to look in ourselves and say, look, if this is a model that works, but which it definitely did because we had a high demand for it. And if this was something that we really wanted to provide to our customers, how do we provide it in a sensible way that's actually being honest to what it is. So if we're telling you that the pre order is going to arrive in two weeks, how do we make sure that when it does arrive in two weeks? Nathan, your address is coming out to you right away.
Speaker E: Yep.
Brian Nguyen: So how do we get to that? Basically, we found Shipstation somewhere along the way. We kind of really knew what we were looking for at that point. So we came into these conversations to these demos and David, I'll be honest with you, we didn't just go to you, we went to a few people at the same time.
Nathan Bush: Does that feel a bit dirty now?
David Boyer: It's all fair.
Brian Nguyen: Oh, gosh. But look, I went on a few dates with a few different providers, but Shipstation really struck out to me as a special one because in terms of the problem that we had in mind, the thing we were trying to cater, the thing we were trying to support, there was just something out of the box that was ready to go with Shipstation and that was the ability to set automation rules, the ability to use tags from Shopify in order to define those automation rules. And then even as simple as the interface was arranged in a way or set up and developed in a way where it was easy for a user to work through a very dense order queue. There could be a thousand orders in there and I could quickly filter through and get down and find Nathan's dress. I can get it out to him today.
Speaker E: Thank goodness for that. Now let's go that next level deeper. Right, let's talk about automation rules and order tags. Can you share how you use them in lioness? Like give us some examples beyond pre order in how it automates your fulfillment process.
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, so beyond pre orders.
Speaker E: Yeah, beyond pre orders, yeah, yeah.
Brian Nguyen: So look, apart from just pre orders, obviously that clears a whole bunch of things from IQ so that we're better able to service the remaining customers that we're able to service today. Those automation rules can leverage tags in different ways as well. For us, we're specifically looking at things like lifetime spends, loyalties, different tiers of loyalty. So those sort of tags you can really leverage to look through your sea of customers and really get to the ones that have been there the longest with you, the ones that have requirements, even those things we were talking about. So like same day deliveries and having a requirement. If a buyer went through our checkout process and said put in the internal, put into the buying, that's hey, could I please have this buy X date because I've got a wedding to go to or whatever it is something really important. We're able to look for those things too and try to use those to better communicate with our customers. For us, especially once you get through the big order queue, we can actually think about well, what other ways do we want to engage with our customer and then how do we find that data and then use that data to get to them quickly and fulfill to them quickly.
Speaker E: Some great examples there, like even that customer lifetime value, one of being able to bump your most valuable customers to the front of that fulfillment queue is such a nice, nice mechanism. David, from some of the retailers that you're speaking to and the implementations that you've seen, have you seen kind of any automation rules or order tags that have stood out to you?
David Boyer: I think, well, honestly, to give Brian and his team some credit, they've built a really sophisticated orchestrated process that is really impressive and I haven't seen something to that degree in a long time, so I have to give kudos there. But I think something that maybe a lot of retailers listening might, maybe it'll translate more realistically is that one of the values of the automation rules is to reduce the manual process of having to decide. You don't need to decide for everything, let the system decide for you. That's really the core of what the platform offers through automation is how to take whatever was promised at checkout and match it through to the equivalent service that, that the retailer wants to use. Right. Whether that's Auspost or any other provider. And there's a lot of bells and whistles around that. But the core is really that simple. Taking whatever parameter from some of the deep integrations that we have with Shopify or other platforms and then using that order information to do the cool stuff of automating the service, maybe adding a note using a different email template that says hey, thanks a lot for being a super repeat customer, whatever. Those small little things that help give lioness or whomever that the really awesome delivery experience, those are just available to everybody really. We feel strongly that we've democratized that to any retailer that wants to use it. And it's relatively simple to set up. That's the other core thing there is that yeah, the interface is pretty self explanatory and intuitive, but it's a set and forget type model. You build it, it does it, you revisit it every once in a while. If you need to make adjustments, then it just does it.
Speaker E: It's a really good point you make there because when you're handing over that experience because we spend so Much money and time on acquisition, on website optimizations. And then to your point earlier, you just go, here's my parcel. I hope it gets there at the most important time. That's when the customer's anxiety is so high. To be able to have those little messages as part of the journey really makes a big impact.
David Boyer: It's funny, one of the things that I like to remind my team here is that the less, and this is so backwards thinking. Well, kind of the less time people spend in our software, the better. Right. If they're just in there for five minutes, they printed, you know, a thousand labels. Awesome. That's great. Right, so we're not, we don't want them spending hours. Right. That's the opposite of the outcome. We want, we want them in there as little time as needed to just do the job that we play, which is helping them print labels. And then they're off to do the things that you mentioned, Nathan. They're, they're optimizing their site, they're thinking about what new marketing campaign can be done, what can they do through social things that can maybe bring more revenue back to the business and they can rest assured that the shipping logistics fulfillment part has been sorted and they can just do it routinely.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Speaker E: And Brian, I think you alluded before to split shipping of orders. That's one thing that I continually hear from retailers is a real bugbear, especially with some of the inventory issues that are happening at the moment. Would you say that you've mastered the split shipping system?
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, like with Shipstation and split shipping is quite, you know, very, very easy to do. It's like David says, less time in the system is always good and less, you know, time spending under the hood and actually having a bird's eye view of everything going on instead. And so, you know, I think Shipstation out of the box is ready to go with that. I think something also I didn't touch on before that is helpful is the, we were talking about less manual things. And so shipstation does have the scan to verify functions that we do actually use quite a lot as well. That's something that means that people are not having to look at, you know, SKUs and barcodes and match it. It's actually just a quick beep, beep, beep, beep. Green light means go and that's it.
Nathan Bush: So how does that actually work?
Speaker E: So do all your packers have handheld devices?
Brian Nguyen: Yes, our packers all have designated workstations where the devices are all local there. That includes, you know, the printer, the scanners, everything. That is. So once you have the trolleys and the bins come across your packing station, all it requires is a scan of the packing slip, a scan of each individual item. The UPCs match up, you see a bunch of green lights and off you go.
Speaker E: Beautiful, beautiful. And I've read that you were able to make significant savings both from the automation that we were talking about, but also by having those features in place, like the scan to verify. How do you quantify the impact that a system like this and the little one percenters that you introduce along the way make over time?
Brian Nguyen: Look, you can quantify, if we're going to nerd down into it, you can quantify the time saving. That's something that you can see as a metric. I can sit there and have a stopwatch on and just check how many seconds are we saving through the scan to verify with those savings? Can we redeploy that capital somewhere else in the business that will generate more value or revenue, whatever it is, whatever the focus is. And so in terms of timeliness, we're looking at things like 50% in some cases or some portions of the dispatch process. In terms of the other things, the invaluable, the unquantifiable things would be the time saved, the less time spent under the hood to actually look at these things or set up the rules and actually look at the business as a whole in a more holistic way.
Speaker E: And I'm sure you did that business case when you were doing your dating rounds. Is there anything that's been surprised you, any specific benefits that surprised you that you found along the way?
Brian Nguyen: I think this is a funny one and it's kind of like, it's pretty honest, but it is a funny one. You know, I won't lie. There have been sort of hiccups along the way, and the surprising aspect has been shipstation's customer service approach. A lot of these softwares or providers, you'll get signed up on the dotted line and then you're in a sea of subscriptions and you'll never get that. The extra support that you do need to get those rules right right away. And so with shipstation, they've got a local office here, a great team under David's care, and we are able to get that support in a very full way. That's in addition to everything that the platform itself provides. I think it's always funny you think you know a thing. Like you don't. You think you know a platform or you think you're really good at using your iPhone or whatever it is. And then one day you see someone else using it in a certain way or someone mentions it, you know, and you're like, oh, we can do that as well. And that's an extra, you know, two seconds shaved off or an extra 5% of errors eliminated or something like that. So there have been a little, you know, things like that along the way. I can't really think of a specific one right now, but there have been.
Speaker E: That's great. And we mentioned the express shipping option and on your site at the moment we've got dispatch promises for two to three days, which is probably, if we're honest, a little bit longer than most retailers. Is that accurate to how long it actually takes to dispatch or is that managing customer expectations?
Brian Nguyen: Our actual dispatch time is if you've placed something today, it's actually going to be out tomorrow. So it's actually next business day. To answer your question, it is managing a bit of expectations in the current climate. Not necessarily anything to do with us, but people, as we said customers do see this whole shipping and dispatch and fulfillment experience as being something that is to do with the retailer rather than any of the providers in the market. So as you would know the headlines in the market right now, a lot of carriers are struggling. If we can absorb some of that pressure in the front end, it kind of helps just to manage that expectation all the way to delivery. But you know, the actual dispatch time is next day.
Speaker E: Yeah, it's smart to under promise over deliver. So I think that makes a lot of sense in today's climate.
Nathan Bush: Now David, you are heading up Shipstation
Speaker E: in APAC and obviously a US company and establishing that presence in Australia. And we've already mentioned some of the integrations and partnerships with people like the Shopify's, the Australia Post, the ship its and it's never been more important to have strong partnerships and backup partnerships for when things hit the fan. What are you seeing in terms of retailers approach to integrations and partnerships? Where are people putting a lot of time and emphasis at the moment?
David Boyer: Yeah, I think that's a really good, really good question and I think it summarizes a lot of ways that encapsulates the predicament that a lot of businesses have in Australia right now is that you want to invest in and long term partners, carriers, platforms. But the dynamic nature of this Covid situation is just forcing people to make choices that are a little bit more prescriptive, more than strategic. And so I think if I narrow in short term what we're seeing is businesses are really desperate for choice. Right. They want particularly on the carrier front. Like the challenges that Australia Post is having right now are really, really quite public and a lot of businesses, because of the expectation from their consumers, they can't just be relying on one provider anymore. They need to pivot. They need to have another national carrier, an alternate, mix things up with Metro delivery and then also regional delivery. So that's what we're seeing in the micro right now is that businesses are pivoting to have multi carrier approaches to how they do delivery. Then if I zoom out more strategically, Brian and Lioness are a really great example of this. Businesses should be looking for consultative approaches to their partnerships.
Speaker E: Right.
David Boyer: Or partners that offer a consultative approach and asking the questions around like how can we put things in place today that'll help us two years from now. Right. Three years from now. So that would be my advice for businesses, retailers looking for across the platforms and the integrations is find a platform partner. 1. Use Brian's point from before it suits your business requirements. Right. Know your business, know how to select the right partner, go on plenty of dates, et cetera and then yeah, asking the questions like hey, like two years from now, like where are you guys headed? Like are we in this for the long haul? And then you know, marrying up with the ones that have a similar vision to yours. Yeah.
Speaker E: So don't get married too early and make sure you marry the right person.
David Boyer: That's right. Shop around.
Speaker E: I like it.
Brian Nguyen: Have a strong prenup
Speaker E: with your legal background, Brian. I'm sure we do have that now
Nathan Bush: guys, we've got to wrap up soon
Speaker E: but I'm really interested to hear because obviously both talking to a lot of retailers at the moment, if someone's kind of on that precipice of going, our order queues are getting out of control. We're at the point where we need to go to the next level in having some intelligence behind this, whether it's shipstation or they're in the dating phase.
Nathan Bush: Where do you suggest?
Speaker E: How do you brief in to understand what solution is right for you? Like because there's so many things that it can do. Right. What are usually the make or break elements apart from having good partnerships and having a support team there?
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, I think it's easy to get sort of over crazed and excited and washed up in the E commerce sort of way that is going on currently. There are a lot of things out there, there are a lot of ways to sell and you can sort of shoot yourself in the foot by doing too much, but nothing well. So to really understand what your business strengths are and what you're trying to either improve or else what your business shortcomings are and trying to improve those. Having a very distinct and targeted approach rather than a one size fits all. Just because something works for another brand doesn't mean it's going to work for us. So we have to really understand the customer. Right? So understand who your customer is, what they want, and how you want to get it to them, basically. And then so once you have those things really clear in your concept, in your mind, I think that's the best time to go dating. You know, if you want to have a white picket fence in a house or do you want two kids or whatever it is. If you have that clear goal and objective, it's easier to find the right partner.
Speaker E: It's a really good point because it's so easy. There's so much talk and so many examples of different shipping methods and fulfillment methods at the moment. So easy to say I need to do all of it when it might not be right for you. There's a lot of hype out there in different areas. What about yourself, David?
David Boyer: Yeah, I think pulling on one of those themes is the question that we always ask is around how much time you're spending, right. As a business, how much time are you spending doing these processes either manually or current system or whatever, and quantifying that, then helping them eliminate that time sync. Because we know that there's a better future where you're spending far less time managing the shipments and more time actually printing and packing and doing the real work. That would be the one thing I would recommend businesses identify. Right. It's like look at the pain points that you have specifically around dispatching. Identify what those are, measure how long it's taking you. Right. And define what fixed looks like or what improved looks like. And then find the platform that can suit that and help you drive towards that.
Speaker E: Yeah, nice. And to Brian's point before, you don't have to be overly sophisticated about at that stage. A stopwatch and a timer works just as well. Right. Set a benchmark. Now, Brian, I'd love to get your thoughts on what you can share around what you've got on your mind or your roadmap around fulfillment for Lioness. What's kind of keeping you up at night?
Brian Nguyen: It's fun. That's a good question as well. Speed is probably becoming less and less a problem. You know, with a private provider like Shipstation, we can work on those Things and volumes, it's just a scale game. The things that keep me up at night would really be about catering to specific markets in different ways. So the best way to expansion is obviously, we've got the local Australian market, we've got New Zealand on the horizon, we've got the US as a very fast growing organic market. And we have to understand, for us as a brand and as a retailer, these people want their products or their service to be a different way. So the thing that keeps me up at night is how do I cater to these different customers in those differing ways without losing focus of who got me here in the first place, who I want to service, and without sort of just lumping them into one category. Because as soon as you feel like you're a customer or consumer, that's just one of many, that's probably when you start getting lost and you go look elsewhere for your product. So for us especially, it's doing that. And the good thing about the partnership that we do have with chipstation is that through the use of automations, of leveraging tags, those sort of things, we can see our customers separately and we can cater to them specifically as a result.
Speaker E: And is there a profitability piece built into that? Because obviously your customer first, but not all customers need their dresses the same day. So you've got to work out what cohorts are expecting that and what ones aren't.
Brian Nguyen: Yeah, that's right. So a more specific example would be, we all know that Brexit happened in the UK, we all know that the EU ICS2 changes occurred this year. Even so, as a result, we didn't want to shut our doors or our shop down to people in those areas, but we had to be able to look at it and go, well, how do we get something to you? Like, we want to get our fashion to you, we know you love it and we know the margins might shrink a bit, or whatever the case is. How do we get it to you then? And, well, it would be impossible to do that without the ability to see each customer as a separate place and to be able to set these automation rules that we keep coming back to so that each of these customers might be able to have a different checkout experience. So if you're in the eu, you're in the uk. For the uk, we're already back registered, so it feels like shopping anywhere else. With the eu, it's a bit more strict, so we have to make sure we do the customs declarations correct and all those sort of things. And so with that, you know, shipstation is able to fill that gap. I say it keeps me up at night. It keeps me up at night in the sense that I have to think about it. But in terms of the tools being there, they are there. We can hone them in.
Speaker E: Yeah. Beautiful. And David, from a ship station perspective, what's on the radar and the roadmap
Nathan Bush: that you, that you are able to share?
David Boyer: Good questions. I think what Brian touched on around global fulfillment is and helping businesses extend their footprint across the world. I think that's you'll see a big focus of that for us in the coming years. There's just so much opportunity for businesses to expand. It really turnkey, right? Because everything's digital now. You can open up a storefront in any region. And what we would argue is the most challenging part for businesses is how do they get that product there right? How do you get the right carriers in the right paperwork like Brian touched on, how do you get that all together efficiently so that you don't have to worry about doing this as things grow, right. As the business starts scaling and things kick off in whatever market you're entering into? We offer a pretty sophisticated network of three PLs through our platform. So that's another way that businesses can leverage not just shipping from Australia. They have to have everything here. They can leverage micro fulfillment centers across the world to reduce costs in that last mile component, the last mile delivery. And so big, big focus for us, like I said before, is how to help brands continue that kind of global footprint that is so palpable.
Speaker E: Beautiful. Now if people and retailers are listening to this, people and retailers are usually the same thing. I've just put them into two different categories. There are listening to this and are going, that sounds really interesting. I'd love to start dating David. How do I do that?
David Boyer: Yeah, well, I won't give up my cell phone number but get in touch with our local team. We're here in Sydney. There's a big group of us now and we'd love to chat. We talk to businesses every day of all different dimensions and sizes are in different parts of this e commerce journey. And I like to think that we have a very consultative approach, like I said before, to helping businesses wherever they are in that journey. I would just encourage anyone listening that needs help figuring out their they're shipping stuff and they want to get that sorted. You know, go to go to shipstation.com, leave us a voicemail, give us a call, shoot us an email and then we can take things from there.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant.
Speaker E: David. Thank you so much. We really appreciate Shipstation support on Add to Cart and being able to bring this extra episode to us. It's always nice to be able to do a bonus episode, especially when there's
Nathan Bush: so many practical tips in there.
Speaker E: So thank you to you as well, Brian. It's really great to hear your story
Nathan Bush: and and some of those, you know, the 1 percenters that you're doing to
Speaker E: really nail that fulfillment experience.
Brian Nguyen: No worries.
David Boyer: Yeah, thanks Nathan. Appreciate being here.
Nathan Bush: If you are struggling with lengthy fulfillment queues, long processing times, or just want to take your fulfillment to the next level, I hope you picked up some practical tips from this episode. And apologies for pushing the dating analogy too far.
Speaker E: I think we just got overexcited but
Nathan Bush: hey, added a little bit of fun. Here are my three practical takeaways. Number one Even though it sometimes feels like shipping is part of the customer journey that is so out of your hands, there are simple ways to elevate the experience. 1 percenters like promoting loyal customers to the front of the queue or adding bespoke messages based on the type of order like Lioness does shows your customers the love at the fulfillment stage. Number two A key metric in your business should be order processing time. A great way to do this is to benchmark the time from when a picking team picks the order to when they complete it. Now, if you don't have the data automated, a simple stopwatch like Brian used will do the trick. This number is key to enabling efficient scaling for your business. The third one I have for you is that when you're evaluating whether you need a dedicated fulfillment intelligence platform, whether that be Shipstation or otherwise, identify the three improvements that will make the biggest improvement to your business and understand how different partners approach them. This is where the dating analogy comes in. It's very easy to get overwhelmed with functionality because these platforms platforms can do so much. So make sure you narrow in on what is most important to you. Thanks again to Shipstation for bringing us this episode. If you're interested in trialing the Shipstation solution for your business, Shipstation have given Add to Cart listeners a special offer. They're giving 30 days free trial and a three months free of Shipstation. If you sign up during October, simply use the code add to cart or one word add to cart@shipstation.com add to cart add to Cart to redeem this offer, that's shipstation.com add to cart using the code Add to Cart. To finish up, I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time listener of Add to Cart and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over to addtocart.com and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll let you know every time a new episode drops, as well as giving you my three takeaways from each episode and a link to the transcripts so you can know that this is an episode that you want to dive straight into. Secondly, if you want a weekly roundup of the best e commerce case studies tools and research, sign up to the Hi5 Friday newsletter which is delivered to inboxes at 8am every Friday morning. I read all the e commerce news and send you the bits that I think you can take action from. Sign up at 12 high 12h I g h.comau forward/high five and the last thing. If you are looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com we are a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands. Check it out. Sign up to the email and get in touch with me if you want to discuss your next move. Until next time, thanks for listening and keep those customers adding to CART.
