Podcasts about shipbob

Michael Sachaj and Joe Lynch discuss the people-first approach to the future of logistics. Michael is a Partner at Hyde Park Angels (HPA), a leading early-stage investor based in Chicago. About Michael Sachaj Michael Sachaj is a Partner at HPA and manages and supports HPA's investment opportunities through their lifecycle. Michael has led investment in a number of HPA's top performing investments including ShipBob, FourKites, Paccurate, and Digit. Prior to joining HPA in 2013, Michael attended Northwestern University and worked at strategy consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton supporting various government clients in the Pentagon. Michael is an avid sneakerhead, new dad, and fluent in Polish. About HPA Hyde Park Angels (HPA) is a leading early-stage investor based in Chicago. HPA's People First model leverages world-class operating expertise, a powerful business network, and venture capital to fuel startup success. HPA's extensive network of 150+ members—comprising entrepreneurs, executives, and venture capitalists—provides strategic value to entrepreneurs by offering expertise and connections to foster growth and innovation. Key Takeaways: The People-First Approach to Funding the Future of Logistics Michael Sachaj and Joe Lynch discuss the people-first approach to the future of logistics. Michael is a Partner at Hyde Park Angels (HPA), a leading early-stage investor based in Chicago. Hyde Park Angels (HPA) is a prominent early-stage investment group based in Chicago, known for its people-first approach to investing.  Positioning HPA in a Thriving Investment Ecosystem: Chicago's early-stage funding market is more vibrant and competitive than ever, reflecting the strength and momentum of the region's innovation economy. In response, HPA is leaning into this opportunity by elevating its brand and deepening its bench of experienced investors. By combining capital with meaningful industry access and hands-on support, HPA is increasingly positioned as a partner of choice for ambitious founders. Integrating Capital with Strategic Expertise: HPA is committed to delivering more than just capital—it provides startups with access to strategic guidance from experienced investors across a wide range of industries. By thoughtfully aligning portfolio companies with members who bring relevant expertise, HPA ensures that founders receive meaningful, tailored support. This deliberate approach strengthens outcomes and reinforces HPA's role as a high-impact partner in early-stage growth. People-First Investment Philosophy: HPA stands out by prioritizing relationships over transactions. By aligning investors who bring deep operational and industry experience with entrepreneurs, HPA creates a mentorship-driven ecosystem that goes beyond capital—turning passive funding into strategic partnership. This approach builds long-term value and attracts high-quality startups. Robust Midwest Deal Flow and Ecosystem Ties: Located in Chicago, HPA leverages its geographic advantage to tap into the Midwest's growing startup ecosystem. With strong ties to local universities, accelerators, and business leaders, HPA gains early access to promising ventures often overlooked by coastal VCs, giving it a unique sourcing edge. Learn More AboutThe People-First Approach to Funding the Future of Logistics Michael Sachaj | Linkedin HPA | Linkedin HPA Paccurate Unpacking HPA's Investment in Paccurate ShipBob Digit Software  Manifest Logistics Conference The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

Our guest for Episode 44 is Marina Golemis, SVP of North America Sales at ShipBob. Marina is a seasoned sales leader with over 15 years of experience.   In this episode, Ross and Marina discuss the importance of shaking things up, being strategic about the ‘get it done' attitude, and delighting in what you don't know.

Join us for our very Special LIVE Podcast from our most recent LA Industry Night! Event ft. a powerhouse panel of iconic wellness-driven Entrepreneurs and Thought Leaders in the industry! Our industry nights gather founders, influencers & creators, media, talent, tastemakers & brands for an intentional evening of good vibes, eats, drinks, goodies and live podcast! Meet your panel: David Ghiyam - Co-Founder of MaryRuth Organics and Spiritual Teacher of Kabbalah Maya J French - Co-Founder of Koia, Happy Pop & Relate Jesse Israel - Founder of The Big Quiet Lori Harder - Author & Founder of Glōci This event was our biggest and most elaborate event yet for Coffee & A Good Vibe LIVE in Los Angeles. Since the growth of the show, we have been creating a lot of Impactful events in the LIVE Events space in both Los Angeles & New York City. OUR INTENTION BEHIND OUR EVENTS: To Curate these intentional experiences to foster meaningful connections and relationships amongst Founders/ Entrepreneurs/ Aspiring Entrepreneurs, Tastemakers in various host cities. Keep an eye out for our next Industry Night / Live Event by following our IG -⁠ @coffeeandagoodvibe! ⁠ Special Mentions & Shoutout to our incredible Event Brand Partners: Retention, Alo Yoga, Goop , Remedy Place , Barry's, BLK, JS Health Vitamins , Casa Del Sol Tequila , Shipbob, Olipop , Cowboy Colostrum , Happy Pop, Koia, Relate, ALTO, Glonuts, Midday Square, MeasureMe . If you want to become a partner for one of our next events, get in touch: pr@growthesocial.com EPISODE SUMMARY: Jesse Israel: Solitude & Navigating Challenging Times Of Life  Personal insights / experience and notable takeaways from having a daily solitude practice.  How do you double down and leverage these practices navigating the hard times of life - during the adversities and storms of life i,e,, job loss, grif, heartbreak, etc.  David Ghiyam: Kabbalah & Consciousness  Ayesha will frame up the context behind this question **- backed in manifesting and creating your dream life  Ask David to explain Kabbalah to the audience, break it down.  How can one access these higher states of consciousness in order to achieve all their life's desires? Remove limiting beliefs, stop blocking themselves.   ENTIRE PANEL: Building Community How did you start building community in your respective businesses / brands?  What was the catalyst that catapulted the massive growth experienced in each of your respective communities and brands?  ENTIRE PANEL: Social Media and Growth Strategies in a digital age  How to create engaging, shareable content pieces online? How to leverage and work with various influencers / creators on the platform to amplify your brand's reach?  ENTIRE PANEL: Future Forecasting in Tech and Wellness  Digital trends in both the tech space + wellness space that you are excited about, maybe implementing into your own business / brand strategy  Areas of gaps / opportunities for founders and entrepreneurs in the audience to be aware of  ENTIRE PANEL: Relationships Question - fun closing!  LIVE Q & A with the audience Share the love & let me know your thoughts over on Instagram,⁠⁠⁠ @coffeeandagoodvibe | @ayeshasehra⁠⁠⁠ CONNECT: YOUTUBE ➟ Watch & subscribe to our channel here ➟ ⁠⁠Coffee & A Good Vibe Video Interviews ⁠⁠ To connect with Ayesha Sehra ➟ click⁠⁠ HERE⁠⁠ Check out our podcast insta ➟ click ⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠ To learn about my Branding & PR Agency Grow The Social ➟ click ⁠⁠HERE ⁠⁠

Social commerce is booming, and today's conversation proves that if you haven't considered selling on social media, then it's time you did. Wes Duquette is VP and GM of B2B and Retail at ShipBob, a tech-enabled 3PL that empowers small and medium businesses with advanced supply chain capabilities. In this episode, he speaks with Liz and Reid about the powerful impact of influencers and platforms like TikTok and Instagram in driving actionable purchases. And it's no surprise that QR codes are revolutionizing the advertising landscape. Wes shares invaluable insights on the critical importance of an omnichannel strategy, global expansion, and scalable infrastructure for brands aiming for growth. His pointers on barcoding, packaging, and back-office systems provide a stellar roadmap for future retail scalability. He discusses the evolving dynamics of direct-to-consumer channels and alternative marketplaces and understands why registering with giants like Amazon is crucial—even if you're a dedicated Shopify seller.    Key takeaways:  How influencers and platforms like TikTok are transforming retail engagement and driving omnichannel growth strategies for brands Learn about the operational scalability challenges faced by SMBs during retail launches and discover strategies for effectively navigating high-volume demands and pivotal retail relationships. Critical infrastructure elements such as barcoding, packaging, and robust back-office systems are essential for ensuring future scalability and seamless integration across various retail channels and marketplaces.   Connect with GS1 US: Our website - www.gs1us.org GS1 US on LinkedIn   Connect with guest: Wes Duquette on LinkedIn Check out ShipBob  

Hyde Park Venture Partners is known for having visibility into more than 90% of mid-continent startups and being early backers of companies like ShipBob, FourKites, G2, LogicGate and Dentologie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this enlightening episode of The New Warehouse Podcast, we're thrilled to welcome back Aaron Hodes, who now serves as the Enterprise Account Executive at Pando.ai and is also renowned as your Supply Chain Sidekick. With a rich history in the 3PL (Third-Party Logistics) industry, most notably at ShipBob, Aaron brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in partnering with e-commerce brands to optimize their logistics and fulfillment strategies. This episode dives deep into the complexities and challenges of the 3PL industry, offering invaluable insights and recommendations for brands looking to navigate this critical aspect of their operations.Get your $2,500 rebate on a Toyota Forklift here. Free floor tape and floor sign samples from Mighty Line! Get yours here.Follow us on LinkedIn here for more content.Support the show

AbbVie's Humira dam is beginning to crack. Crain's health care reporter Katherine Davis talks with host Amy Guth about how the tide appears to be turning as CVS' pharmacy benefit manager replaces the blockbuster drug on its formulary list.Plus: City Council greenlights Johnson's plan to pump $1.25 billion into housing and development, ShipBob picks JPMorgan to lead IPO, ex-Citadel exec's trading firm expanding and moving to revamped Loop tower, and how Chicago's venture-capital and startup scene stacks up globally.

TikTok is a channel with HUGE potential for eCommerce brands, and if you want to make it work for you - you need to listen to this episode.Host Chloe Thomas is discussing the ins and outs of the various TiKTok and TikTok Shop strategies you can deploy with a group of total TikTok Experts including:Barney Waugh, TikTokBen Muir, Unsociable - ads expertManisha Taparia, Shipbob - ops expertThiago Nogueira, Insense - influencer expertHit PLAY to hear:How to work out what you should be doing on TikTokHow to set up TikTok Shop to create happy customersTips on creators, organic, and ads!And much, much more.Key timestamps to dive straight in:[02:02] Best way to drive sales on TikTok[06:35] Can you do just one TikTok marketing tactic?[10:00] Do you need to invest in your organic brand account?[13:02] Ads![15:39] Who does TikTok Shop work best for?[19:52] Do you list all your products on TikTok Shop?[24:50] What incentives are there to use TikTok and advertising?[27:25] Live stream success tips[32:57] Fulfilment and Ops checklist[38:04] Affiliates and Influencers advice[44:19] Their 2024 strategy tipsFind our notes here: https://ecmp.info/476Contact SHOPLINE >>> https://ecmp.info/shopline Take our Listener Survey Now! https://ecmp.info/survey You could win a £$50 Amazon voucher Get all the links and resources we mention & join our email list at https://ecmp.infoLove the show? Chloe would love your feedback - leave a review here: https://ecmp.info/review or reply to the episode Q&A on Spotify.Interested in being a Sponsor? go here: https://ecmp.info/sponsor This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podsights - https://podsights.com/privacy

Listen in as Gefen from Vendocommerce joins us in this month's TACoS Tuesday episode to share expert insights on the evolving landscape of Amazon PPC advertising. We're unwrapping the tactics that have driven success in 2023 and looking ahead to what 2024 holds, with a keen eye on the emerging trend of vertical video ads. Discover how an integrated approach to advertising, factoring in the halo effect on overall sales and product rankings, can amplify your brand's presence during crucial retail events. We also delve into how to use Helium 10 to easily optimize and track these strategies for superior performance in the year to come. In our conversation, we compare the accessibility of Sponsored TV with the robust control offered by Amazon DSP, especially for smaller brands looking to maximize their advertising efforts. Learn why testing and patience are critical when navigating these platforms, and understand the strategic organization of sponsored product campaigns to optimize ad groupings. Plus, Gefen imparts valuable advice on marketing products with different attributes and the potential pitfalls of violating terms of service when it comes to product hang tags on Amazon and Walmart. Tune in for an enlightening discussion that could reshape your approach to Amazon advertising. In episode 527 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Gefen discuss: 00:00 - Amazon Advertising in 2023 and 2024 03:10 - Vertical Video Ads Trend 09:29 - E-Commerce Behavior on TikTok Shop and Amazon  13:13 - Amazon's Sponsored TV and Publisher Ads 14:25 - Comparing Sponsored TV and Self-Serve DSP 16:51 - TikTok and Amazon Trust and Fulfillment 19:19 - Amazon Advertising and Product Attributes 20:46 - Optimizing Advertising Creatives on Amazon 30:10 - Helium 10 Tool Cerebro ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Carrie Miller: Sponsored TV ads. What worked for ads in 2023 on Amazon and what to look forward to in 2024 with Amazon ads. This and so much more on today's episode of the Serious Sellers podcast.   Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic   Carrie Miller: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller and I will be your host, and this is our TACoS Tuesday, where we talk about all things Amazon advertising, and we have an expert guest today. So this is Geffen from Vendo. So welcome, Geffen.   Gefen: Hey, Carrie, it's a pleasure to be here.   Carrie Miller: Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm very excited to have you on. I know you've been on here before and a lot of people really liked your episode, so we have some more good content for everyone today. And so for those of you, for those of the people in the audience that don't know you or know about Vendo, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience, and then also about Vendo?   Gefen: Yeah, 100%. So I'm the VP of advertising here at Vendo. So just a background on what Vendo, who and what Vendo is. So we are a full service e-commerce agency specializing in Amazon and Walmart, full service management From an advertising perspective. We have kind of brought in those services across Amazon and Walmart also to bring in things like programmatic, various retail media networks, as well as other marketplaces too, and so those have been incredibly, incredibly growth focused. I mean, 2023 was a very crazy year. The team did an incredible job from a strategic standpoint, from a number standpoint, to grow across the board and when it comes to PPC, as most of the people I hope know, on this call, a lot of those different strategies rhyme. So we've been able to replicate the immense success that we've had on Amazon. We brought it over to Walmart and then we brought that over towards the various retail media networks, as well as things like Page Search and Social with Google, facebook, tiktok, etc. Amazing.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, so you guys are into everything. That's awesome. So I guess, since you were talking about 2023, what are some things that you think worked really really well Specifically in 2023 that you might carry into 2024? And then maybe some new things on the horizon because of just the changing landscape and things that Amazon is introducing right now.   Gefen: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll start with the second half of that question, because I think that vertical video is going to be a really big push for Amazon this year. I know that everybody's talking about that in the space. I'm very curious to see how it's going to be rolled out. I mean, if you think about it from a practical standpoint, it's going to take up more page real estate than the, than the former video format. Now they might have both horizontal and vertical in play. We also don't know where on the search engine results page it's going to show up. Is it going to show up on row four, which would be row four, five, six on mobile, potentially even row seven, depending on how, you know, zoomed in your screen is, or is it going to be at the bottom of the page? And I think those are big questions because that's going to place a big emphasis on where you're ranking. And so I think that that leads into the first part of your question, which is something that worked really well for us, because we don't look at ads in a vacuum, right?   Gefen: So you know, ACoS is great, but obviously this is TACoS Tuesday and taco of your sales, yes, and so when we're looking at total sales, something that we brought in and I know it's a little vague, but we really looked at the halo impact of ad strategies and how they impacted ranking, ranking and total sales, right. And so when we focused our ad strategy maybe on a cost per customer acquisition model, maybe on a taco's model, and we look to really prioritize, hey, where are we showing up, right? So if, if we're driving all this traffic and we have a 20% conversion rate, let's say, on this keyword, are we tracking, using a Helium 10? Of course, are we tracking that ranking properly? To say, hey, we started running these ads aggressively on August 1st and if we've been tracking ranking on that keyword for the last two months since going aggressive on that term, where are we ranking now and how has it changed?   Gefen: And are there broader KPIs that we're measuring outside of just direct ad revenue? And that worked really well for us because we centered that around 10 poll events and this is a really big strategy of ours. That is incredibly complex, it takes a whole village to actually execute. But when we, when we focus our customer acquisition and ranking models around major times in the year so think Prime Day, think fall Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Holiday, and then, of course, if you're a one off brand, if you I don't know are ski related, then obviously your season is January to March. You know like there are differences, but really peak seasons. If you're able to focus your growth model around the times that are going to give you the most reward, then that worked really well for us last year and we expect to see a lot more of that this year, especially as we all expect people are going to be more deal oriented, the constant battle for margins. So the better ranks you are, the more organic sales you drive, the better your TACoS is.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, so are you. Are you also maybe sending a lot of outside traffic for that ranking as well, or just utilizing? Can you tell us a little bit about that and what your strategy is there? That kind of goes in with what you were just talking about?   Gefen: Yeah, absolutely so. One of the verticals that I oversee is paid search and social, and so that's going to be met in Google primarily. There's Pinterest, there's Reddit, there's now TikTok. That can drive back to Amazon as well. I think there's two buckets. I think you have the always on external strategy right, which is the constant drip of, say, a Facebook campaign that's driving, whatever the budget is $200 a day, $150 a day, whatever it is back to Amazon. We all know that Amazon is going to reward external conversion a little bit more. Also, the Amazon attribution program gives you a bit of a boost with getting up to 10% back usually around 5% to 7%, but up to 10% back on each sale, which is nice. And then you also get a boost in your actual ranking. The influencer programs that we've run specifically for 10 poll events again, to go back to that first point, those are the ones that have really kind of set themselves apart or set those brands apart, the ones that are willing to have very strategic and targeted strategies towards high return on investment periods. And so you have the always on, which is great, that is a constant, and we run that for many brands. And then we have a few brands, usually on the larger side, that are willing to invest some serious cash into some of the of Amazon programs that are just going to drive as much traffic as possible. Those are the ones that see big gains, and it's not necessarily that you have to hit a home run with one TikTok influencer. You can have 10, you can have 20, you can have 30 micro. That actually get you the same result potentially for cheaper. But you have less risk with putting all of your eggs into one basket, and so that external traffic has been really helpful.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, I actually know some people in our elite group said that their ranking just organically just shot up just from their TikTok stuff that they were doing. They were focusing on certain keywords in their title and they just all the traffic from TikTok was really bad, yeah, and now there's actually a TikTok shop, so that's actually going to compete with Amazon.   Gefen: We've actually launched multiple brands on TikTok shop. We're seeing phenomenal success with those. It doesn't necessarily directly translate to Amazon sales, but what we always say at Vendo and it's the approach we've taken that has been very successful for all of our brands is you can't separate your customers anymore, right, you can say that an Amazon customer is in its own bucket and they're never going to be a DTC customer, and vice versa. Yeah, every customer everywhere you're exposed is a form of advertising and you can't force a customer to buy in a certain place. So if you're available on TikTok shop and that's where they find you, maybe next time they're going to buy an Amazon, right? Or maybe they're going to buy your DTC. As long as you're looking at the business holistically and Amazon is a piece of that pie, or TikTok is a piece of that pie, then, and your business is growing, then you know that your efforts are pushing the whole business up.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, I was saying that I think that a lot of people aren't necessarily comfortable yet purchasing on TikTok, so I think that's why a lot of people are just going to Amazon. They might be like, oh, I saw this on TikTok, but maybe it'll change eventually, because I think we're still seeing quite a bit of traffic on Amazon, even though TikTok is like not wanting anyone to do that. Have you seen that same thing?   Gefen: Yeah, I can't remember what the exact term was. It was like I saw this on TikTok, or I found this on TikTok, or seen on TikTok, or something like that.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, TikTok.   Gefen: whatever the thing is, TikTok is game here, yeah it was one of the largest search terms a few months ago. And so, to your point, 100% right, yeah. And that is actually, I think, more proof to my previous point, which is, wherever they're seeing things, they're coming to other places, to their comfortable place to buy. And so if they're coming there and from an advertising perspective, we're showing up where we need to show up, then we're in a good place, right yeah, because then we're going to get that conversion and that you just you spent elsewhere. Maybe your customer acquisition was slightly higher, but you drove that conversion.   Carrie Miller: Yeah.   Gefen: And, at the end of the day, if you have a good product and your customers are loyal, then it's going to pay off in not even the long term.   Carrie Miller: Do you see that a lot, because I know you do a lot of DSP too. Do you see that a lot with DSP, where you're kind of putting a lot into Amazon and maybe you don't necessarily see the exact conversion on Amazon, but then all of a sudden their website goes way up or kind of other platforms.   Gefen: So a couple of points to that. So, when it comes to programmatic, there is there is native programmatic on Amazon, right so. And then there's also non-native programmatic, right, so we can use something like the trade desk that can kind of target any programmatic targeting across the entire internet. Basically, the latter, yes, right, so the latter we do see that kind of um, that kind of halo impact across either website, and you can, you can also measure that right. You can put in a pixel and you can actually, so you can also put in a pixel on the, on the um, on the Amazon DSP as well. So you can put a pixel on your website for Amazon DSP and even though traffic isn't necessarily driving to your website, it will still pick up if there are sales on your website or, at the very least, visits from that same campaign. And so the interconnectedness of this world is growing, where the advertising synergies are becoming a lot more um, a lot more intentional, and so you have to have the pixels on your DTC site, right. You have to be launching on TikTok, you have to be on Amazon, on Walmart, because if you're not measuring that, then you won't know if, if your sales are lifting across the board. And if they are lifting, then you don't know where you can take spend. Maybe you're bloated in one area and two lean in another and you can put those and so, uh, to your question, 100%. Um, we do see the halo impact from DSP with Amazon DSP specifically. I will say the biggest halo impact is actually in the performance of the PPC ads. Um, we usually tend to see, especially on our mid, mid to large size brands, um, when we launched DSP for them, their PPC ads tend to pick up in specifically in performance. So their, their ACOS tends to go down. Um, and that's probably because Amazon, as we all know, is a, uh, is a pay to pay platform, so they're just rewarding you with being further entrenched in their ecosystem.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I did have actually another question, um, kind of about just some newer things that are going on with Amazon. Have you started the using the, the TV ads and then also just the sponsored um ads that go to uh like things like Buzzfeed and um, I forgot what the it's called, I think it's uh Sponsored Product Ads but they go to publishers. Have you started using those?   Gefen: So yeah, Sponsored TV.   Carrie Miller: And then also they're sponsored ads that go to like Buzzfeed or yeah, yeah.   Gefen: So two points. So, first off, Bradley's point. We actually don't use Paki for Amazon. We uh use them for Walmart. Uh, we actually use software for Amazon, besides Helium 10, of course. But as far as management software goes, uh, it's, it's all manual, um, um, but, and we can talk, we can have a whole 10 podcasts just on that. Yes, there's a ton there, but as it pertains to sponsor TV, so that's something that Amazon launched at uh, unboxed this past year, um, and the goal is to create similar to how sponsored display is like DSP light, sponsored TV is like STV or CTV light, right, so they want to bring the, the, the TV portion of programmatic, into a self-serve area. There's pros and cons. The pro is that there's no minimum, there's no barrier to entry. You can throw up a video and it gets blasted out towards a bunch of different publishers at a um at a uh, fairly, fairly decent rate. It's a little bit more expensive, obviously, because you're not able to put your max CPMs or anything like that. At the same time, you have no control. So, similar to sponsor display, um, you know, if you work with and uh with an um, with an agency like Vendo, uh, we don't have any minimums on our uh, on our uh, on our DSP self-serve seat, so we're able to uh to say, hey, you know, if you want to spend a thousand or 2000 or 3000, you can, you don't have to spend 20.   Gefen: Um, and so my recommendation is, if you're a very small brand, you're starting out, definitely test out sponsored TV. Don't expect because they're usually non-engageable, or or, if they are engageable, um, the really the primary KPI and what they're optimized for internally is views. Um then, don't expect a strong row as treat that as a top of funnel approach. Yeah, at the same time, if you do have a little bit more budget and you want some more control, go into self-serve DSP. You're just going to get more. You can choose what your destinations are, what your publishers are, you can choose your audiences, you can choose your retargeting. You can't in sponsored TV too, but there's just a lot more control and so, similar to sponsored display, it's a great launching pad. But I wouldn't say, hey, if you're going to take 10 grand and throw it into there, take 10 grand and throw it in the DSP, you're going to see better results.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, that's very good advice for everyone, as far as the DSP, Very good advice for everyone, especially for smaller brands, Cause usually it's all you know, it's harder because a lot of people are focused on big brands with kind of strategies and smaller brands is like I don't know if it's time to do even DSP or the sponsored TV. So that's good advice about the TV and there is no real, like right time.   Gefen: I would just say hey, if you have some budget, if your ads are performing well, test it out.   Bradley Sutton: You know, we test as much as we can, I mean if it works, amazing.   Gefen: You know. If it doesn't, then we know it doesn't and maybe we'll test it out later on. But we can put that budget immediately into other areas.   Carrie Miller: How long do you usually test it for DSP? Two or three months or?   Gefen: Technically, DSP is a 14 day window before it's actually giving you proper data and usually DSP you'll know within a month.   Carrie Miller: Okay, that's good to know too. Okay, so then we have Chris Shipperling said to your point about trust people also want to see the product ASAP and Amazon owns product operations. I bought a product from TikTok which is from Shipbob. I'll say no more as a customer.   Gefen: Yes, you can technically fulfill with Amazon for TikTok shop. I don't have too many details on that, but I know it's possible. I don't know how much of that is being conveyed to the customer, and so that's a great point about trust from the. From the customer standpoint as a seller, it doesn't really take much more. I don't know the fees, I don't know what it kind of entails, but I know that I've heard that is possible.   Carrie Miller: I it is possible and that's definitely a better. You basically connected to your Shopify site and then use the fulfillment by Amazon. But I I did purchase something on TikTok and it was literally shipped all the way from China. So I didn't know that was happening when I bought it. So that is kind of the that's going to kind of ruin some trust, I think, with people. So something to think about moving forward.   Gefen: If you even talk about Temu here either, because that's a different ballgame.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, that's another one. All right, and let's see, Chris Shipperling has something else. He says, which, which is why you always KPI individual platform metrics, but blended CAC is so important when you do have several activities running to drive traffic and conversion. Completely agree with what you were saying, so yeah, 100%.   Gefen: We use a cat model for a ton of our brands. We track new to brand customers on Amazon very closely new and repeat as well, and we have we have a lifetime value graphs that we track over multiple years to see what the actual return is for our clients.   Carrie Miller: Amazing, that's awesome. Okay, so, Michael, would love to hear your thoughts on how to organize Hold on sponsored product campaigns. Thank you, you lost your audio there multiple skews in a category, independent skews, not variant ASINs that share many keywords. When is it better to combine ASINs into an ad group and let Amazon pick the best for separating each SKU into its own ad group or campaign?   Gefen: Thanks, it's a phenomenal question and this is where you're going to hear the variation in answers. You're going to hear shows that advertising still, to an extent, is a good amount of art versus science, because there are different opinions and I manage my own brands for Vendo as well, and I've actually done both in terms of separating out and then keeping them together. So a couple of different things. Number one there are always differing what's the word differing attributes to a product, right, whether it's a count, whether it's a size, whether it's a color, at the very least you can separate out by that. So, for instance, if you have TVs, right, you might have a smart TV. Right, so let's. But you could have a 45 inch, a 55 inch and a 65 inch smart TV. So, right off the bat, you can look at the search volume. For what is a 65 inch TV bring in in terms of search volume? Okay, that's, that's a separate campaign, right, 55 inch, separate campaign.   Gefen: And then to your question, my recommendation and best practice is you can never rank and and equally grow all of your products, right, you have to have a hero item or a hero couple of items. So, for instance, let's say you go back to these TVs. You've got, I don't know, 10 sizes, 354555, whatever it is. Some of those are going to be best sellers, right? More people search for 55 inch and 65 inch versus 24 inch, so you know that those are the ones that have the highest potential and those are the ones that you're going to want to rank. So you might as well take those, and maybe take three of them, and put them into their own hero term campaign, so smart TV, tv, etc. And then that way you're focusing the majority of your ranking spend on the highest search volume terms towards the few that are actually going to generate that sales and performance.   Gefen: And even within that, I mean usually think about it. I mean, how many brands do you see that have three products ranked on the top row? Right, it's usually one. And so at the end of the day, we are going to try and diversify our sales as much as possible, but at the same time, one product is going to win out. And so to the last part of your question, when it's better to combine a since into an ad group on Amazon, pick the best when it comes to your hero items. Let's say you've got three and that whole product line the three best selling colors, three best selling sizes, whatever it is, put those into their own ad group and then Amazon can choose. If you're again going back to smart TV, it's like, okay, someone's typing in smart TV, Amazon's going to eventually know whether or not someone typing in smart TV is more likely to buy 55 inch or 65 inch. And you'll be able to see the conversion rate, you'll be able to see the performance and you can say that's good, that's not good, etc.   Carrie Miller: We'll go into kind of ad creatives like videos and stuff. How do you optimize those? Are you doing a lot of tests and split testing? What is your process for creatives And so when it comes to the best. ?   Gefen: So, again, we have five ad verticals. Every vertical requires different size creatives. So we have a phenomenal team working on our creatives that can really customize to whatever it is that we want or need. A Facebook creative is going to be different from a DSP creative. It's going to be different from a, from a credo creative. But to backtrack for a sec, specifically on Amazon, specifically for something like sponsored brands because you're sponsored brand lifestyle imagery and sponsored brand video, right, those the two main creatives that you're going to be generating. And I will say, first and foremost well, first of all, by January 31, all of your product collection ads have to have a lifestyle image on them, if not, they're going to be paused. So that's a note to everybody that's selling you need to have a lifestyle image on your product and ads, if not, they're just not going to show up. That's by the end of this month, but I've found, from a video perspective, having a video versus not having a video gets you 80% of the way there. Of course, it needs to look like decent, right, but if you have any form of a decent video made by, made by a graphic designer or software, that's good enough to pass for you to be like okay, I'm fine with that. You're 70 to 80% of the way there. Obviously, that 20% for much larger brands matters.   Gefen: So that's where you bring in different testing, right, and usually that's at the discretion of the brand's creatives, right? We're not a full creative agency. We have creative support, and so what we like to do is we like to take their direction and actually make the asset. So usually they have a marketing team that's going to bring us either static imagery or video imagery, and then we're going to scale that into, let's say, three different videos from that static imagery of just like slideshows or whatever, and then maybe we'll test out those three. Now Amazon's sponsor brand video has different ad groups that you can test out, which is awesome. So you can do like three different ad groups there and whatever ends up working. Basically, from a CVR standpoint conversion rates going to be your primary KPI there Then that's the one that you go with.   Carrie Miller: All right, very good, we actually have something else from the audience. I sell yoga pants. Can I print my website on the product hang tag? Does it follow Amazon and Walmart terms of service?   Gefen: I don't think it does. I don't think that you're allowed to drive any form of traffic to off Amazon. Don't fully quote me. I am not an expert in all of Amazon terms of service. I know the ad portion. But if you were to ask me my two cents, I would say if you're referencing your website anywhere on your product and Amazon catches you, it's probably against TOS.   Carrie Miller: I do actually on mine, have on our packaging our website, because we use the same packaging for all different platforms and I know big brands also have their websites in there and they even have you know things where maybe it's not enforced. Yeah, I don't know if it's enforced as much, but I think it's if you kind of drive traffic to your website or you're kind of contacting people with their info. But it is kind of a gray area there. So yeah, that is a hard one.   Gefen: Yeah, it's tough. I know that on any assets you have on Amazon you can't do that. We've even made videos where, like at the end, like we've just taken a video from their website and put it onto sponsor brand video and it was like at the end, like the last slide was like buyonx.com.   Bradley Sutton: And it got taken down. Yeah, exactly.   Gefen: It just depends. I mean there's a lot of gray area. My guess is that's against TOS. Also to your point, Carrie if a lot of people are doing it, maybe it's not really a police stuff that much.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, I think. I think the kind of differentiator is are you trying to drive traffic away from Amazon, or you know? I think it's also when you think about big brands. I don't think they're all going to change their packaging just for Amazon?   Gefen: I guess that's going to not yeah, yeah, so that's also a good point.   Carrie Miller: It's not really. You know it's when you're like you've got an insert and you're like buy this on my side or you know something like that. That's kind of a difference, whereas if it's just on your packaging, I think it's, it should be fine.   Gefen: Yeah, um, that's actually a good question. So, do do branded campaigns help in the organic rank of your product? It's yes and no. So when you're launching, 100% yes If you're launching a new product line inside your existing product catalog, um to leverage your branded campaigns is huge. Or, excuse me, your branded traffic with branded campaigns is huge because that's how you build your sales velocity quickly. Same time, if you are seeing that you know a majority of your spend is going towards branded um, then I would look at the CPCs and I would say you're probably not um helping out with ranking as much as you could be for non-branded terms. Remember, amazon will rank you based on how you perform on non-branded terms. If you don't drive traffic to non-branded terms, you can't convert against them. If you can't convert, then you can't rank. Yeah, good point.   Carrie Miller: All right. Another question from Douda to Silva how do you harvest search term reports from a main keyword running as phase type, phrase type? That uh generate tons of variations of the main keywords. Those keywords are all different, with one clicks costing me a dollar.   Gefen: Yep, that's some. That's probably arguably the largest source of waste it's been. Um is phrase terminology, phrase terms, phrase keywords that generate one click, $1, no conversion. You have a thousand of them, you spend $1,000 and you didn't get anything as a result. Um, switch it to exact, pause it out and then test out them in like groups of 15 or 20. It's more manual work. It kind of sucks. But if you take the thousand dollars you spent, let's say over a month, and then you um, you take 500 of that, so you save yourself 500 and you put it towards 30 keywords and you test and let's say you generate sales after driving 10 clicks on each, on five of them, and then you use those as ranking campaigns. That's how you're able to scale the business. You're going to spend that money anyway. You might as well go deep rather than shallow, all right. Sounds like he was. He was testing me. He said correct.   Carrie Miller: Hmm, that's. That's an interesting test, all right.   Gefen: I'm glad I passed.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, yeah, you're definitely passing all these little tests here from people. Um, uh, just on a kind of an ending note um, are there any other kind of things you want to leave for people in 2024? Kind of final thoughts of you know what to look forward to, what, what people should be focused on, and uh, and yeah, just any final words of advice search volume trends.   Gefen: We use Helium 10, I mean hourly, but daily, obviously uh to to look at where the search volume trends are in the space. And when I talk about 10 poll planning, when I talk about uh, uh, high, high traffic times, um, it's just the nature of the beast that you are going to perform better at certain times of the year. Um, you need to have a strategy that is able to address low demand and high demand to what you need your business to do, and so the more demand you're tracking, um, the better, uh, you're going to be able to prepare for that. And just a very simple equation or a simple example, excuse me, is um, if you know that last year you did phenomenal in December, um, then take the steps in October and November to make sure you're ready for that. And if that might mean taking or spending less in August and September, if you do have an annualized budget, then make sure you're looking at December in February, so you know that by the time August and September comes, you know what you need to do to prepare for that time of year. And so you, you know, we have, for almost every term, we have four, five, six years of data. At this point. You know what the best times of the year are. Obviously, things change every year, but we do know that, hey, if you're a holiday or a gift brand, prepare for that Right. And if you, if you are a brand some brands don't, but if you are a brand that has a hard dollar budget, make sure you don't get to December and you're out of money.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, that's a good point. Something to point out too about the Helium 10 tools Cerebro. We have um. It has shows trending if of keywords trending up or if it's trending down. So you can constantly check the trends and how much, what percentage, they're trending up and down. But then you can also do historical keyword searches for 24 months in the past. So that'll really really help. You know, you can kind of see year over year in the last two years what happened. But then you can kind of project also moving forward based on kind of the difference there and track it that way. So definitely, you know that's a really good point. Is, you know, kind of projecting out and making sure you plan properly your budget in the right places, very good? Well, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of tACoS Tuesday. If somebody wants to reach out to you, how can they find you?   Gefen: They can find me by my email, geffen at vendor commercecom. Yeah, would be happy to talk anything. Advertising, um, we, like I said before, we run ads. If you can run ads on it, we do. But we take a different approach and that we make sure that we are looking at your business holistically and we're not just spending to spend, we spend to grow and so, um and so, because we spend to grow, we might recommend different strategies and say, hey, you know, even if it hurts us, right, because we take a cut from that, even if it hurts us. Say, hey, you know, you shouldn't spend 100 can meta. Maybe let's look at these different avenues or save that money for later on. We want to make sure that we are going to provide the best service for you guys.   Carrie Miller: That's amazing. Yeah, thanks so much. I love you guys. Want to reach out to Geffen or Vendo? You need somebody to help you with TikTok ads or Facebook or Amazon or Walmart Walmart especially. I get asked all the time about Walmart, and Vendo is definitely one of the uh the top uh players in the game for Walmart.   Gefen: So one of the largest advertisers on Walmart. Um, I think we have one of, if not the most, brands on Walmart advertising and um, we've just seen so much growth there.   Carrie Miller: And so, yeah, thanks again for joining and thank you everyone for your questions and for joining us live, and we will see you again on the next TACoS Tuesday, which will be next month, and we'll have a different guest. But thanks again, Gefen, for joining us.   Gefen: Of course, see you later.  

Casey Armstrong, chief marketing officer at ShipBob, and FreightWaves' Tony Mulvey dive into the recent Black Friday shopping holiday and how e-commerce shopping has evolved over recent years. The discussion will look into the future of outsourced fulfillment, allowing for brands to focus on product development and sales and marketing of their core business, while eliminating chokepoints in the fulfillment process. Casey Armstrong - CMO - ShipBob Tony Mulvey - Analyst - FreightWaves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Casey Armstrong, chief marketing officer at ShipBob, and FreightWaves' Tony Mulvey dive into the recent Black Friday shopping holiday and how e-commerce shopping has evolved over recent years. The discussion will look into the future of outsourced fulfillment, allowing for brands to focus on product development and sales and marketing of their core business, while eliminating chokepoints in the fulfillment process. Casey Armstrong - CMO - ShipBob Tony Mulvey - Analyst - FreightWaves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join Rick Watson as he speaks about the supply chain needs of growing mid-market brands in a wide-ranging interview with the Dhruv Saxena, former brand owner and current CEO of ShipBob. The topics from the interview cover the origins of Shipbob, challenges facing brands, choosing the right solution partners, and more! RMW Commerce has proposed a new category of service provider to fit the needs of these growing brands called the Fulfillment Accelerator. The background of the interview comes from an extensive report written by RMW Commerce which you can find and download here: https://www.rmwcommerce.com/fulfillment-accelerator-whitepaper

Casey Armstrong is the CMO of ShipBob, a global omni-fulfillment platform providing businesses access to the best-in-class supply chain and fulfillment capabilities. Over the past five years, Casey has overseen the marketing, partnership, and growth teams. Before joining ShipBob, he was the VP of Marketing at BigCommerce, where he led the digital, content and SEO, growth and CRO, and other marketing and operations teams. Casey is passionate about helping startup companies establish growth and marketing strategies. In this episode… eCommerce has become an increasingly competitive market — prompting the need for innovative marketing strategies. In efforts to scale their companies, some e-commerce brands have invested resources in delivering their products to a global market, partnering with popular retail stores, and prioritizing a personalized experience for consumers. What strategies can you implement to scale quickly while increasing your profit margin?  Brand originality is a valuable currency in the e-commerce industry. Your marketing strategy must captivate and compel your target audience to purchase your product over competitors. But in a saturated market, novel marketing tactics are rare. Rather than spending marketing dollars on reinventing the wheel, Casey Armstrong advises e-commerce brands to borrow strategies from influential brands to inspire their marketing approaches. As your brand grows in popularity, partnering with a third-party logistics (3PL) company relieves you of fulfillment duties — allowing you to focus solely on growing your business. On this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris welcomes Casey Armstrong, CMO of ShipBob, to discuss trending e-commerce marketing strategies and the benefits of incorporating 3PL into your business model. Casey shares how borrowing influential brands' strategies can maximize your profit margins and explains why simplifying your goals makes business decisions effortless.

Join Nelson as he speaks to Lara Morgenthaler, Chief People Officer at ShipBob. They discuss why Lara moved from recruiting to HR business partnering, building tolerance for change, whether you can teach curiosity, lessons from working at Amazon, and much more. Book a demo of HowNow: https://hubs.la/Q01RWy9P0 Download your FREE Death of the LMS guide: https://hubs.la/Q01RWyMr0 See HowNow in action! Sign up for a live walkthrough: https://hubs.la/Q01RWzht0  Running order 0:00 Intro and Lara's first job in HR 3:34 Moving from recruiting to HR business partnering 8:15 Can you teach curiosity 9:21 Lessons from 6 years at Amazon 12:00 Recognising you're ready for a CPO role 16:51 What Lara wishes she knew at the start 18:17 Current HR and people challenges 21:41 Building an inclusive workplace 25:38 Quickfire questions Find Lara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laralandua/ Find Nelson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelsonsivalingam/  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gethownow/message

Recorded at Metatopia Online 2021 Presented by Mel D'Amato Anyone who makes or sells consumer goods has been watching the news about shipping and logistics in horror. The cost of freight is up. There are no shipping containers to put goods into. Products are sitting on docks in Asia. Full ships can't get to port to unload on this side of the ocean. Our expert, Mel D'Amato from ShipBob, talks to us about what's going on, why everything is terrible, and what we can expect over the next several months.

Marina Golemis is the SVP of North American Sales at ShipBob. ShipBob is a tech-enabled fulfilment platform that supports over 7000 ecommerce companies. Under Marina's growth they are having incredible growth as she's touched every part of the customer acquisition process. Today Marina joins us to discuss how leaders can learn to trust themselves and their perspective and why understanding the confidence journey is so important for a sales leader. You can connect with Marina on LinkedIn here (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinakogan/). For video excerpts of this and other episodes of the Sales Leadership Podcast, check out Sales Leadership United on Patreon Here (https://www.patreon.com/SalesLeadershipUnited).

Join us for our very Special LIVE Podcast from our most recent LA, LIVE Coffee & A Good Vibe Event ft a powerhouse panel of iconic Brand Names, Experts and Entrepreneurs in the industry! Meet your panel: Jake Karls - Founder of Midday Squares  Jessica Sepel - Founder of JS Health  Montana Tucker - TikTok Star ⁠Dylan Barbour -⁠ Co-Founder of Vizer App, Former Reality TV Star  Michael Chernow - Founder of Kreatures of Habit This event was our biggest and most elaborate event yet for Coffee & A Good Vibe LIVE in Los Angeles. Since the growth of the show, we have been creating a lot of Impactful events in the LIVE Events space in both Los Angeles & New York City. OUR INTENTION BEHIND OUR EVENTS: To Curate these intentional experiences to foster meaningful connections and relationships amongst Founders/ Entrepreneurs/ Aspiring Entrepreneurs, Tastemakers in various host cities. Keep an eye out for our next Industry Night / Live Event by following our IG - @coffeeandagoodvibe! Special Mentions & Shoutout to our incredible Event Sponsors: Route, AMASS Botanicals, BiOptimizers, Shipbob, JS Health, Dream Pops, KOH, Midday Squares If you want to become a partner for one of our next events, get in touch: pr@growthesocial.com EPISODE SUMMARY: PANEL QUESTIONS How do you continue to strengthen your self-awareness on your purpose that allows you to show up in the way that you do and use your platform for purpose?  What roles do you think authenticity and transparency play when building a successful brand community on social media? How does JS Health approach product innovation?  What do you think are the most important factors when trying to differentiate a brand, and why? Networking & Relationship Building: How to build beneficial relationships for your brand Mental Health: How to get yourself out of a rough mental health / the lowest moments and periods in your life to completely transform your life What is the ultimate for of success and fulfilment in life? What brings you fulfillment? LIVE PANEL Q & A with the audience Share the love & let me know your thoughts over on Instagram,⁠ @coffeeandagoodvibe | @ayeshasehra⁠ EPISODE MENTIONS: Route's free mobile app helps you track, discover and experience the world's brands through a reimagined e-commerce network that connects and empowers both consumers and merchants. Their platform also offers a full suite of features on the B2B side of their business - from helping with their post-purchase experience and offset the carbon of their online orders. Route has built a network of over 20 million app users and 20,000+ brand partners. Download Route for FREE in the App Store! Or if a brand founder / team interested in learning more, email pr@growthesocial.com and we will get you connected with the team! CONNECT: YOUTUBE ➟ Watch & subscribe to our channel here ➟ ⁠Coffee & A Good Vibe Video Interviews ⁠ To connect with Ayesha Sehra ➟ click⁠ HERE⁠ Check out our podcast insta ➟ click ⁠HERE⁠ To learn about my Branding & PR Agency Grow The Social ➟ click ⁠HERE ⁠ To connect with this week's guest click  ➟ ⁠HERE

In this episode of The New Warehouse, Kevin interviews Aaron Hodes, an enterprise account executive at ShipBob.  Aaron brings an extensive knowledge of the 3PL and brand relationship to the podcast this week for an insightful discussion on what to look for in a 3PL, upcoming challenges, and the importance of inventory accuracy for e-commerce brands.  Follow us on LinkedIn here for more content.

Open communication and transparency are the foundation of your company culture. But they can be double-edged swords, given that it's tricky to determine how far you should go with being transparent. According to our guest Marina Golemis, transparency is non-negotiable but still isn't a standard. Also, not all information brings value to your team, so it's critical to at least share the information that can affect their work, performance, results, etc. Marina is the SVP of North American Sales at ShipBob and has over 15 years of experience in sales. She joins our host Christina Brady to share what goes on behind-the-scenes of sales and CS, the difference between the two, and why they should work in tandem. She also explains how she uses past experiences to be successful in her current role and be a good leader. Marina and Christina discuss the importance of feedback, especially when employees give it to their superiors.

Phillip Akhzar and Joe Lynch discuss why packaging matters. Phillip is the Founder and CEO of Arka, a tech enabled packaging platform that provides custom and unbranded eco-friendly packaging to SMBs at competitive prices. About Phillip Akhzar Phillip Akhzar is the Founder and CEO of Arka, a tech enabled packaging platform that provides custom and unbranded eco-friendly packaging to SMBs at competitive prices. Phillip is a serial entrepreneur, Y Combinator alum, and sustainability and supply chain expert. Prior to starting Arka, Phillip founded and successfully exited a few startups. Phil began his professional career at Boeing Aerospace. Phil is a San Francisco native, who earned an Industrial Engineering degree from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. About Arka Arka is a tech enabled packaging platform that provides custom and unbranded eco-friendly packaging to SMBs at competitive prices. Arka is integrated with Shopify, BigCommerce, Square and Shipbob and their integrations provide a seamless experience to their customers when they order packaging. Arka's API uses AI to auto-replenish packaging inventory for warehouses and 3PLs. Arka Packaging has the flexible packaging solution ecommerce businesses need to stand out from the crowd with custom and unbranded eco-friendly packaging. All of Arka's paper products are FSC certified. From their material offerings, to how they ship, to the facilities they use, it all utilizes the latest eco-friendly and sustainable practices.  Key Takeaways: Why Packaging Matters Phillip Akhzar is the Founder and CEO of Arka, a tech enabled packaging platform that provides custom packaging solutions to the SMB market. Ecommerce packaging is one of keys to a great customer experience. A box that is ugly, too big, or too difficult turns customers off – and they might not buy again. Arka works with both shippers and warehousing companies. For shippers: Arka has worked with over 2,000 entrepreneurs, small businesses owners, and makers of all sizes to understand what matters most to their unboxing experience: low minimums, premium materials, quick turnaround, self-service tools and the flexibility to scale orders. For warehousing companies: Arka automates the packaging ordering process by connecting Arka's API to the warehouse management system (WMS). By automating the packaging ordering system, companies eliminate packaging inventory shortages, the hassle of inventory counts, and dozens of emails and phone calls. Learn More About Why Packaging Matters Arka on LinkedIn Arka on Instagram Arka on Twitter Arka Case Study Introduction to Packaging Your Products with Phillip Akhzar The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

Welcome to this week's special episode from our most recent and our first ever Industry Event for Coffee & A Good Vibe! We have been doing our Live Podcast Events in LA & NYC for close to a year, but this was our very first of the Industry-Style Events with a highly intentional guest list of like-minded individuals. This Event Style has always been a HUGE vision of mine to bring to life. I always say on the podcast, that your vibe attracts your tribe. There is such a profound power in this style of event - There is such a profound power and magic in bringing together - when you intentionally bring amazing humans in a room together amazing things can flourish, spark and happen That is where the real fulfillment, juice and magic comes from the relationships we build for ourselves and what honestly birthed our next event series for CAGV, the Industry Dinner Series. And if I can be even just a sliver in your path in sparking one of those abundant connections, then my purpose is being SO abundantly fulfilled with these events and everything I am striving to build for CAGV. So many more of these intentional events to come for 2023 - keep your eyes and ears open on our instagram for the next one! x Share the love on Social --> @coffeeandagoodvibe EPISODE MENTIONS: Special Thank You to our Brand Partners of this event, Still Life - Get in touch with the team to inquire about their program - Emily Gray, e: emily@still.life Shipbob, Live Conscious, AMASS, Rila App, Glonuts, Dream Pops, Deux, Midday Squares, Blk Water and Drink Sound. CONNECT: YOUTUBE ➟ Watch & subscribe to our channel here ➟ Coffee & A Good Vibe Video Interviews To connect with Ayesha Sehra ➟ click HERE Check out our podcast insta ➟ click HERE To learn about my Branding & PR Agency Grow The Social ➟ click HERE

For this episode of the eCom Logistics Podcast, we welcome George Wojciechowski, the CEO of Manifest, an e-commerce fulfillment provider. He is on a mission to tackle the sustainability problems of e-commerce logistics while simultaneously providing brands and merchants with a better fulfillment experience.George talks about his professional journey starting in finance and then starting ShipBob to cater to a new segment of online merchants. In 2021, George founded Manifest which is committed to finding sustainable alternatives to fulfillment. He shares their green initiatives and how they are disrupting fulfillment with the end goal of protecting the environment that we collectively share.   ABOUT GEORGEPrior to launching Manifest, George cofounded ShipBob, a predominant name in the global e-commerce fulfillment space. Before ShipBob, George worked as a trader at Goldman Sachs. George attended DePaul University. HIGHLIGHTS02:00 Catering to the emerging market of online merchants27:45 Manifest was started to tackle the environmental issue of fulfillment32:34 Sustainable fulfillment is a need that must be addressed today41:25 Finding alternatives to unsustainable packaging QUOTES47:50 Sustainable packaging is actually not more expensive to manufacture - George: "A lot of the packaging companies told me that it's actually not more money to produce the sustainable packaging but because everyone just asks for the same things that they've always asked for, the manufacturing is more expensive. It's cheaper for the traditional goods because it's just manufactured in much higher volume."52:56 Common sense and innovation will create the disruption needed for sustainable fulfillment - George: "We can talk about sustainability, we can talk about environmentally friendly, we can talk about regenerative, but nothing beats common sense and figuring out ways how to keep up with mass fulfillment, high-velocity fulfillment, but also do it in a way that is packaging efficiency is going to move mountains in terms of how sustainable we are as an industry." Find out more about George in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-wojciechowski-870b814/Twitter: https://twitter.com/wojskigWebsite: https://manifest.eco/Email: george@manifest.eco

In Episode #138, we explore building and scaling a fulfillment business with handcrafted algorithms. We're joined by Jivko Bojinov, ShipBob's Co-Founder. We cover the challenges of a fulfillment business, ShipBob's custom warehouse algorithms, and the importance of transparency with staff and customers alike. “Ultimately, transparency to your customers is extremely important, no matter how difficult it is to display.” — Jivko Bojinov EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED) https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/shipbob-jivko-bojinov  FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/shipbob-jivko-bojinov-transcript  CHAPTERS This episode is our definitive guide to building and scaling a fulfillment business with handcrafted algorithms. In it we cover: (00:00:00) – Introduction (00:01:40) – The origin and scaling of ShipBob (00:06:38) – Meeting customers at their pain points (00:10:56) – The challenges of a fulfillment business (00:15:04) – Expanding from ShipBob warehouses to partner locations (00:24:28) – Custom software for scaling ShipBob (00:33:18) – ShipBob's algorithms for stowing, picking, and packaging (00:43:06) – Strategic projects within the fulfillment space (00:51:53) – The importance of transparency with staff customers alike ABOUT SHIPBOB Jivko Bojinov played professional tennis before co-founding ShipBob with Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati in 2014. Jivko is currently the Senior Vice President of Strategic Projects at ShipBob. And over the last eight years, he's led the development and launch of almost every major strategic initiative at ShipBob, from their transition from owning their own fulfillment centers, to developing an asset like partner network of fulfillment centers, to the launch of affordable two day shipping for all of ShipBob's customers.

In Episode #137, we deconstruct Jivko Bojinov's peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. Jivko Bojinov is the Co-Founder of ShipBob. We cover falling in love with the problem, inspiration from pro tennis, and maximizing learning early in your career. “At the start of your career, maximize learning and not your title or your pay, because the dividends that you would make over your lifetime from the greater knowledge and experience that you have early on your career are exponentially higher than getting an extra 5K on your signing from a company out of school.” — Jivko Bojinov EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED) https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/jivko-bojinov-playbook/  FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/jivko-bojinov-playbook-transcript/  CHAPTERS In this episode, we deconstruct Jivko Bojinov's peak performance playbook—from his favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on his life. In it we cover: (00:00:00) – Introduction (00:01:21) – A fascination with eCommerce and logistics (00:02:57) – Making the most of opportunities (00:04:57) – Inspiration from pro tennis and Rafa Nadal (00:09:21) – Perseverance under pressure (00:10:57) – The early morning habit (00:12:22) – Humility, resilience, and The Count of Monte Cristo (00:15:30) – Why you must fall in love with the problem (00:20:07) – Maximize learning early in your career ABOUT JIVKO BOJINOV Jivko Bojinov played professional tennis before co-founding ShipBob with Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati in 2014. Jivko is currently the Senior Vice President of Strategic Projects at ShipBob. Over the last eight years, he's led the development and launch of almost every major strategic initiative that ShipBob has shipped, from their transition from owning their own fulfillment centers, to developing an asset-like partner network of fulfillment centers, to the launch of affordable two-day shipping for all of ShipBob's customers.

Listen to one of our favorite moments from tomorrow's Spotlight episode featuring ShipBob with Jivko Bojinov.

Listen to one of our favorite moments from tomorrow's 20 Minute Playbook episode featuring Jivko Bojinov. In it, Jivko Bojinov shares their favorite books, tools, habits, and more.

Manifest Commerce is a 3PL (third-party logistics) platform that aims to be a true logistics partner to merchants by providing them with high performance fulfillment done in an environmentally responsible way.  They've only just begun, and have already deployed:No Plastics during the fulfillment process (Elimination of bubble wrap, bubble fill & plastic tapes)Carbon Offsets of all shipments included in pricingBiodegradable and / or recyclable boxes, poly mailers, and void materialSustainable warehousing - Our fulfillment center is run on 80% renewable wind energyClear data and monthly reporting on your business environmental impactGeorge Wojciechowski is the Cofounder and CEO of Manifest Commerce. Manifest Commerce provides sustainable fulfillment solutions to eco-friendly brands and omnichannel retailers. Prior to launching Manifest Commerce, George cofounded ShipBob, a predominant name in the global ecommerce fulfillment space. George has held several roles in various investment communities including Goldman Sachs, among others. Michael Gongol is a founding member at Manifest.  Prior to entering eCommerce logistics Mike toured the country supporting musical acts before joining ShipBob where he led the sales team in the capacity of Sr. Enterprise Account Executive for over 5 years.  Start lending to regenerative farms today at: gosteward.com.Companies mentioned: - Eco Packables: https://www.ecopackables.com/- Provenance: https://www.provenance.org/- Rhode Skincare x Boox: https://my.boox.eco/scan-demo/rhode - A New Earth Project: https://anewearthproject.com/ - Atlantic Packaging: https://www.atlanticpkg.com/2022/04/atlantic-launches-a-new-earth-project/- STEP'N: https://stepn.com/Connect with Manifest:Website: https://manifest.eco/Email George: george@manifest.ecoEmail Michael: michael@manifest.eco

Recorded at Metatopia Online 2021 Presented by Jordan Russell. What is DDP? What is VAT? How can I expand my business Globally? If these are questions you have asked yourself then this session is for you. Come grab some knowledge with Jordan Russell (from ShipBob) on how to expand your business into different markets around the world. Becoming a global business isn't as scary as it seems.

August 5, 2022 ShipBob Dhruv Saxena, Small Biz Acquisition Financing Chris Hurn and IBM Security Limor Kessem

On today's episode, Kunle is joined by Dhruv Saxena, co-founder and CEO of ShipBob, a market-leading warehouse management that provides warehouses as a service, or 3PL to largely Shopify, BigCommerce, and direct-to-consumer eCommerce space.Experimenting with side projects such as eCommerce startup while being a full-time software engineer, Dhruv, with his business partner and friend, Divey had to endure long lines at post offices during lunch breaks to mail customers' orders. Faced with the difficulty in mailing orders and being too small a business for 3PLs, Dhruv utilized his knowledge as a software engineer and started working on the automation of mailing their products which birthed the idea of ShipBob.Building ShipBob from the ground and starting with a 10,000-square feet warehouse, Dhruv shares ShipBob's aim to help small local eCommerce businesses access ShipBob's network and wide-range fulfillment services. Being part SaaS and part warehouse, he offers new innovations such as Merchant Plus, a software that small businesses can use to manage their own warehouse while being able to access ShipBob's network.This episode is especially inspiring as you'd hear Kunle and Dhruv talk about how eCommerce businesses are doing despite facing macroeconomic headwinds. You will also get to learn about the early years of ShipBob, their work culture, and how customers and merchants were always at the forefront in making the decisions and direction for ShipBob. Take advantage of the golden nuggets dropped in this episode, especially if you're a small business owner looking to level up your logistics.-----------SPONSORS:This episode is brought to you by: WayflyerAs you continue to grow your eCommerce business, access to growth capital will increasingly play a significant role in achieving and surpassing your financial and social goals.Why should you give up equity or pay high interest rates to grow your business?There is a new way to access growth capital that transforms eCommerce businesses.Wayflyer has shaken the way eCommerce operators access working capital.With a dedication to only DTC eCommerce businesses, Wayflyer will fund you on a fairer “fund as you grow” model, meaning if your sales slow down, so does the amount you transfer back..There is just a simple fee and the funds you need to grow are deposited to your account instantly.It's worth checking out – Wayflyer.comKlaviyo This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo – a growth marketing platform that powers over 25,000 online businesses. Direct-to-Consumer brands like ColourPop, Huckberry, and Custom Ink rely on Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you own customer experience and grow high-value customer relationships right from a shopper's first impression through to each subsequent purchase, Klaviyo understands every single customer interaction and empowers brands to create more personalized marketing moments. Find out more on klaviyo.com/2x. Gorgias This episode is brought to you by Gorgias, the leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce merchants.Gorgias combines all your communication channels including email, SMS, social media, live chat, and phone into one platform. This saves your team hours per day & makes managing customer orders a breeze. It also integrates seamlessly with your existing tech stack, so you can access customer information and even edit, return, refund, or create an order right from your helpdesk. Go to Gorgias.com and mention 2x eCommerce Podcast for two months free.RechargeThis episode is brought to you by Recharge, the leading subscriptions payment solution for Shopify merchants.Recharge helps eCommerce merchants of all sizes launch and scale subscription offerings. Recharge powers the growth of over 15,000 subscription merchants and their communities—turning one-time transactions into long-term customer relationships.Turn transactions into relationships and experience seamless subscription commerce with Recharge.Find out more on rechargepayments.com/2x.

In this episode, Grace breaks down recent retail headlines and what the news means for the future of retail technology. She also invites the co-founder of ShipBob to discuss the state of the retail industry from an SMB perspective.With fully furnished state-of-the-art repair trucks and a full array of roadside tools, you  can expect the safest, fastest, and most painless response for your fleet from Love's Truck Care & Speedco. To learn more about our roadside assistance, please visit www.loves.comFollow Point of Sale on Apple PodcastsFollow Point of Sale on SpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts

A lot has happened in the last 24 months when it comes to shipping and logistics due to the pandemic, and you might be wondering what the immediate future holds. Here to give us his take is Dhruv Saxena, Co-Founder and CEO of ShipBob.com, one of the largest global 3PL providers that is trusted by over 7,000 brands and fulfills orders all around the world. We're deep-diving into all things logistics, warehousing, and international shipping as Dhruv shares his perspective on the status of international logistics and what you can expect if you're trying to move goods from one point to another. We're also talking about the biggest changes he's seen on the fulfillment side, where popular freight carriers stand after COVID, and what the availability of warehouse space looks like across the U.S. You'll learn some of the best and worst logistics stories Dhruv has ever heard and get the low-down on the demand for same-day shipping for anyone whose name is not “Amazon.” You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/3OVLUx4 Interested in our Private Community for 7-Figure Store Owners?  Learn more here.   Want to hear about new episodes and eCommerce news round-ups?  Subscribe via email.

If you are an eCommerce brand and starting on the eCommerce journey, 3PL may appear to be an attractive option. You might feel that the only thing matters for eCommerce is sales and marketing. But as you advance in your journey, you will quickly realize how critical your operations are for your customer experience. If your customers can't receive the right products at the right time, they will not stick with you for very long, regardless of how compelling could be your messaging and customer services interactions. But the biggest frustration would be to be penalized for none of your faults. How would it feel if your 3PL shipped your competitor's product to your customer? But that's what happens when you lose control of your supply chain. While the new 3PLs make it look very attractive due to their tech capabilities, the age-old problems with 3PLs are still the same. And ShipBob is no exception to that.In today's episode, we invited a panel of cross-functional experts for a live interview on LinkedIn who brings significant expertise to discuss ShipBob's capabilities. We discussed their strength and weaknesses and why they should not be confused with an eCommerce platform. Finally, we discussed their pricing, comparison with the traditional 3PL players, and the value they offer for the eCommerce merchants.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

On this episode, we talk to Kevin Marvinac, VP of Partnerships at ShipBob. Kevin explains the difference between most standard 3PLs and ShipBob, a brand who bends over backwards for their merchants by building their own warehouse management system and providing a top tier customer experience. We then talk through Kevin's passion for sustainability and how the ecommerce industry can make massive strides to better our world. Finally, we talk through Recharge's favorite statistic, lifetime value. Shipbob maintains a significant focus on LTV by providing opportunities for merchants to increase average order value and decrease churn.

Dhruv is the Co-Founder/CEO of ShipBob, the leading global omni-fulfillment platform designed to provide small and medium-sized businesses access to best-in-class supply chain and fulfillment capabilities.Dhruv started ShipBob in his Chicago apartment in 2014, and has scaled it today to over 7,000 e-commerce brands, with fulfillment centers around the world. They've raised $300m+ and have achieved a $1B valuation.In this episode we discuss:Going from an Electrical Engineering PhD to building things How did you end up building things?What were some early ideas and products you tested?What led you to the problem you're solving with ShipBob?How did you build conviction to quit your job and start ShipBob?Founding ShipBob and finding Product Market Fit What was the problem you were trying to solve?What was your initial solution?How does third party logistics work and what was new about ShipBob?How did you solution evolve over time?How important was timing with e-commerce wave and how did you approach competition?What were some of the biggest inflection points that drive growth?When did you know you had strong product market fit?Approach to blitz-scaling How did you approach scaling an operations heavy business?What was your approach to getting the unit economics right before scaling?How did you approach fundraising and finding the right partners for your business?How did you approach blitz-scaling and how did you evolve your role as a leader?What advice do you have for founders making the transition from pre to post PMF mode?Logistics market and recent disruptions What are some of the challenges you and your customers are facing?What have been some of the recent headwinds and tailwinds for e-commerce brands?Closeout questions What is the most challenging/difficult feedback you've received — how have you processed it and incorporated it going forward?What are you optimizing for at this point in your career and how has that evolved over time?What are your superpowers that you find yourself leaning on often?LinksLearn more about ShipBobFollow ShipBob on TwitterHit subscribe to keep up with new episodes!Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter for summariesClick here to give feedback — it only takes a minute

Dhruv Saxena and Joe Lynch discuss the ShipBob story. Dhruv is the CEO and Co-Founder of ShipBob, the leading global omni fulfillment platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses to provide them access to best-in-class supply chain and fulfillment capabilities. About Dhruv Saxena Dhruv Saxena is the CEO and Co-Founder of ShipBob, the leading global Omni fulfillment platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses to provide them access to best-in-class supply chain and fulfillment capabilities. Dhruv came to America (from India) in 2007 to pursue an undergraduate engineering degree. He attended Purdue University for both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering, and after graduating, worked as a software developer and engineer in Chicago. Dhruv and co-founder Divey Gulati founded ShipBob from their apartment, going to extreme lengths to get the startup off the ground in 2014 - including marathon coding sessions and poaching their first ShipBob customers while they waited in long lines at post offices to ship their packages! Today, ShipBob is valued at over $1 billion (June 2021) and has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. About ShipBob ShipBob is the leading global omni fulfillment platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses to provide them access to best-in-class supply chain and fulfillment capabilities. The ShipBob platform provides merchants with a single view of their business and customers across all of their sales channels, and enables them to manage products, inventory, orders and shipments, and leverage analytics and reporting to run their business effectively. Founded in 2014 out of Chicago, ShipBob was launched through Y Combinator by co-founders Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati, two entrepreneurs who saw a need for more efficient shipping for ecommerce businesses. Today, the company has raised $330.5 million in funding and operates a global logistics network with 30 fulfillment centers across five countries, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, European Union and Australia. Key Takeaways: The ShipBob Story Dhruv Saxena is the CEO and Co-Founder of ShipBob, a global omni channel fulfillment solution trusted by 7,000+ brands to ship orders everywhere their customers shop. In the podcast interview, Dhruv shared his own personal story along with the ShipBob Story. Founded in 2014 by Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati, ShipBob has become one of the fastest-growing tech companies in America. In just a few short years, ShipBob has grown from working out of Dhruv's apartment to a Chicago headquarters and hundreds of thousands of square feet of warehouse space across the US. The ShipBob mission is to provide the best fulfillment services for their customers, so they can focus more on what's important  — growing their business and delivering a remarkable customer experience. ShipBob enables their clients to: Ship everywhere, from anywhere. Seamlessly connect new commerce channels and apps. Gain more control and improve accuracy within the warehouses. ShipBob has a network of warehouses connected by a common technology that help their clients to determine optimal inventory placement across the network to improve delivery speeds and reduce shipping costs. ShipBob offers their customers the ability to scale efficiently by distributing inventory into additional warehouses over time. Learn More About The ShipBob Story Dhruv's LinkedIn ShipBob LinkedIn ShipBob  The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

In this week's episode we take a deep dive into the tech stack that's behind the success of ShipBob, a global shipping fulfillment solution for Ecommerce, Direct To Consumer and B2B brands. We catch up with CMO Casey Armstrong to uncover what tools are driving the success of the company, currently valued at a billion dollars. Casey's advice for the stack is simple ⁠— literally. A bloated and cumbersome tech stack explodes under the weight of useless, dead or unusable tools that cause a ripple effect through your entire stack. Our host, Dan McGaw of McGaw.io shares insights into what this might look like in a scenario known as the stackpocalypse. We learn how Casey drives growth by getting alignment across his teams. We'll hear why it's important to build the stack you'll still want in the future to avoid swapping tools out amidst growth. Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack. You'll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

If you enjoy the show, and it has helped you, or you just want access to our Post Show Wrap-Ups, FREE Guides, Discounts to Courses and Conferences, then I'd invite you to consider supporting us on Locals starting at just $5 a month!  To check it out, head over to https://thesubscriptionboxshow.locals.com/ There's also some FREE stuff there if you just want to browse first, so check it out and let me know what you think!In this episode, Karley debunks the myths around international shipping.  Can anyone big or small really ship anywhere?  She takes subscription businesses and helps them save on their shipping.  And in this episode, she'll tell you how can as well!Enjoy!!!Website: https://www.shipbob.com/IG: N/ALinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shipbob/Karley's Email: kdaudell@shipbob.com To support the show, or join the community for EXCLUSIVE content, like our post show wrap ups, head over to Locals: https://thesubscriptionboxshow.locals.com Reaching out to Eric:IG: @thesubscriptionboxshowFB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thesubscriptionboxshowWebsite: https://thesubscriptionboxshow.comEmail: eric@thesubscriptionboxshow.comPrograms & Courses:The Subscription Box Experts Academy:  https://ericmusick.krtra.com/t/jIw4to2rXSoQThe Ultimate Guide for Graphic Design: https://www.thesubscriptionboxshow.com/resourcesJulie Ball's Subscription Box Bootcamp 2.0 Course Link:https://ericmusick.krtra.com/t/h67apnWbBQ9cGary Redmond's Email Experts Academy: https://ericmusick.krtra.com/t/1ljRUMBfHnCp

This episode features Kevin Marvinac. Kevin leads Partnerships at ShipBob, a global logistics platform that fulfills e-commerce orders for direct-to-consumer brands. Previously, he led the Growth and Product teams at ShipBob and worked in growth marketing and operations at Tide Cleaners (formerly Pressbox) and Airbnb. He is a certified specialist in wine and lives in Northern California.Kevin Recommends these Resources:Measure What MattersRadical CandorTalking to Humans

EP289 - ShipBob Co-Founder Dhruv Saxena  Dhruv Saxena is the co-founder and CEO of ShipBob, Inc. ShipBob is a tech-enabled third-party logistics provider (3PL) that fulfills e-commerce orders for direct-to-consumer brands. We discuss ShipBob's origin story, how the e-commerce fulfillment industry has evolved, as well as the challenges and implications of Amazon and Shopify's various fulfillment initiatives. Episode 289 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday March 18, 2022. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 289 being recorded on Friday March 18 20 22 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:37] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason as you know we did a Amazon Fulfillment deep dive a couple weeks ago and that was quite a popular Topic in episode and we've been getting a lot of questions from listeners about what's going on in the world of and we are now living in a world where products used to be if you get it in a week that was amazing and now anything that's longer than 2 days feels like a lifetime so we thought it would be good to bring on one of the top startups in the Fulfillment area the shipbob and we have with us the CEO and co-founder of shipbob dhruv saxena dhruv welcome to the show. Dhruv: [1:20] Thank you so much Scott and Jason for having me excited for our conversation. Jason: [1:24] We are looking forward to it as well I'm getting tons of complaints on the feet already that people were expecting Bob to be on the show today so you'll have to tell us how it became dhruv started shipbob. Dhruv: [1:36] Yeah for sure I'll give you a quick back story on me if that's the opening question and tell you how did we come up with the name shipbob. Jason: [1:46] That would be perfect yes I asked it very awkward we Scott is laughing at me on the back Channel. Dhruv: [1:51] Yeah so. Quick back story on us you know I grew up in Delhi India came to the u.s. in 2007 to pursue engineering my co-founder on shabaab device is also from India we've known each other all our lives. And so we after we both did an engineering in the midwest here I went to Purdue we came back to Chicago and started. I'll booking in a full-time jobs at software programmers and on nights and weekends as most Engineers do. We were trying and experimenting with a bunch of thought of ideas and one of the start-up ideas was in e-commerce. And be Engineers we were able to automate effectively everything in that e-commerce business except the part around shipping and Logistics. And so every time you would have a bunch of folders we would have to run to the post office here in Willis Tower Chicago in the basement, they have a post office and we would have to stand in line and basically ship out those orders out and that became the most manual and painful part of our e-commerce business. And we wanted to find ways of automating that. [2:58] And we would call up a bunch of these existing companies 3pls who helped companies with the shipping and Logistics take all three pills third party Logistics providers. And none of them wanted our business because we were too small for them, and so that got us thinking as to hey how do others small to mid-sized e-commerce businesses figure out their shipping and Logistics we realize that there really isn't a good alternative for businesses like ours who are you know ramping up e-commerce businesses and that caught us into, thinking what should pop can be. And how did the name come about you know so when we started thinking about building a company for helping businesses with their shipping and Logistics needs. We were going for like like people want fast shipping so we should have ship and a fast you know like an animal name or something like a ship park or a ship Cheeto something on those lines so that it conveys. That heylia company which helps you with fast shipping and all of these that domain names were taken, stop after a while godaddy's recommendation engine you know started recommending you no other alternative domain names and one of them was shipbob for 299 or something, and so we say you know we don't have money but this seems like a cool name and so if you just turned shipbob.com for 299 and that's the story of her name and so now we have a good messaging around hey, Bob Means bending over backwards for your shipping or Bob can be a plumber Bob can be you know any use for gyves but as Bob kennels to be a shipment so that's like the marketing angle on shipbob. Scot: [4:24] Very cool so it's interesting because this kind of parallels a lot of a lot of companies in e-commerce they start with people building e-commerce stores and then they're like, this part of it stinks I'm just going to focus on solving this so what is your original e-commerce store do. Dhruv: [4:42] So we started were doing a lot of like printed photographs and so you know this is like 2013 2012, bear Instagram had just been acquired by Facebook for like a billion dollars and so we thought oh wow that's photo-sharing seems to be like a heart, market right now and Instagram is all about digital photo sharing so what if we brought back the Retro way of sharing pictures which is people would print and mail pictures to each other so our e-commerce business was that you would send us a photo. Honor text bot we would print that photo we would frame it we would write a message at the back of the for any personal message you wanted and mail it to your friends and family all across the world. And so that was sort of you know our big idea then like physical photo sharing. Scot: [5:28] Cool car like frame bridge I think does some of that now cool yeah so then you you did you wind that down as you kind of pivot it over to the Fulfillment center. Dhruv: [5:39] Yeah it won't down on its own to be honest because once we started focusing on on shipbob E that business wasn't really taking off with shipbob first was was so we started spending a lot more energy on shipbob. Scot: [5:52] And then so that was 2015 earlier kind of also 2014 yet. Dhruv: [5:58] Now 2014 2015 we got into this incubator called y combinator Scott so. That allowed us to you know quit our full-time jobs because y combinator gives you like a hundred and twenty thousand dollars so that was enough money for us to like put in you know our notices on a full-time jobs and go all in on shipbob. Scot: [6:20] Brickell so you got no Y combinator and then that usually requires you to go out to Silicon Valley for a period of time did you guys do that or are they at some point they introduced remote but I think that was later. Dhruv: [6:32] Much later yeah no that's a good question so. This is another great sort of Peace around you know building startups and Chicago so when we go into YC. We were one of the very few companies you know. Who did not relocate to California so it was it wasn't mandated or Partners there were very comfortable we okay with us traveling back and forth. So every week on Tuesday they have these partner meetings but you go and tell them the progress you've made. And so we would fly every Tuesday morning to our Mountain View California do our pitch and you know and learn and then come back and because, we had to fly and I was you know what a red eye flight Etc it was a lot of effort so we would always try to make sure that we have enough progress that we've made in a given week to make that trip worthwhile otherwise we would go there and we will just come out looking like we didn't really do much and that would be a waste of our time so that pressure of making that trip by productive I think in the early days for stars to work way harder, that may be a lot of other companies simply because you know we were putting a lot of effort and these so and capital in making those trips and but we headquarter the business in Chicago. I'll see you know which turned out to be you know pretty good decision I guess in hindsight. Scot: [7:49] Yeah and then you know what's really interesting and I kind of live this every day so I'm curious how you path you took here as software people you know we love to solve things with software and at some point shipping is not a software problem right you can you can build the world's best shipping but at some point some human has to and maybe a robot but you know some something has to move a package from point A to point B sometimes Point c d and e and then someone has to you have this middle Mile and this last mile when did you guys realize that you're going to have to actually have like fulfillment centers. Dhruv: [8:26] Um right from the prions yeah pretty much. Because you know coming out of the running your own e-commerce business and then also a couple of other startups before then. Like. Be being Engineers yes we were very accustomed to writing a lot of code and then just hoping that users will show up and none of the startups are for shipbob for us worked out, and one of the realizations that would be in the way had is that just because you build it doesn't mean that people will come, and so you would have to spend a lot of your time and energy in making sure that you actually spend you know time on sales marketing and distribution and so when so we were very. Early before even adding code we were talking to our customers and these customers you know who would eventually become users or loyal users. Told us very clearly that we don't really care about great software what we care about is a great product or a great service which helps us in packaging and shipping so that influence the decision-making right. We can't be a pure software company these Merchants are paying us because they need great fulfillment service so having our own fulfillment centers probably requirement for us before we can start scaling. Scot: [9:36] Got it okay cool so you go do y combinator and then women did you like build your first like when did you have your first fulfillment center. Dhruv: [9:48] So right at the you know when you started the company like our office and my apartment became sort of a file template. Fulfillment center very Loosely here so you won't really be able to. Call the Department of proper fulfillment center but you know it did the did the work so there was enough room in our apartment and enough first office. Which is like I think thousand square feet for us to have some room for people to send us their product and we would store their inventory. And then have couple of hours basically pick pack and ship you know those boxes out so my apartment was on the 31st floor so every evening we would get a big. Little trolley and put all the packages and that's all a and then use the freight elevator to bring those packages to the ground level where Michael ejector words you know use the car and we'll take it to the post office. Scot: [10:41] If you're in Jason's building he would have reported you as like a probably a drug dealer some suspicious Behavior going on up on the 31st floor. Dhruv: [10:50] Yeah no. Jason: [10:51] I'm just grateful the city planners that do the zoning didn't hear this story. Dhruv: [10:56] Yeah you know it. Scot: [11:00] It's not illegal if you don't get caught. Dhruv: [11:02] You know we did get in trouble in the early days with the local post office so what would happen is again you know because we had been. We didn't have a lot of successful startups before shipbob Beaver like way paranoid about finding customers. And we none of us came from the sales and marketing background so we tried to run for this position where you can we find customers in the most cheapest and fastest way possible and the obvious answer to us was let's go outside the post office because there's always a line, people don't always seem very happy or to go to a post office and so if he. Can find a few e-commerce merchants in those lines we can pitch them that idea while they are still in the line and convince them to give us their package and not go to the Post Office the second webinar. And so we spend the first three during by see it is like a first three to six months of our shipbob basically standing in lines outside different post offices in Chicago to convince people walking in that shabaab is a better alternative than you going inside the post office. So the post office Forks very nice people thought that we were trying to take business away from them. [12:10] So they were sent they would call up these post office apparently post office has its own police do something so they would send out these post office cops, who would comment she was away and so we would just go from one post office to the other like based on you know which one had last called the cops on us and so, I think some post office might still have a picture of Jessica and the way to make sure that they don't show up again. Scot: [12:33] Hello. Jason: [12:35] Those cops are federal agents by the way they're not messing around. Dhruv: [12:38] Oh man I hope they did especially because we were immigrant Founders so we can't get in trouble with the the federal police. Scot: [12:49] The federal jails and I hear pretty nice though so good they have tennis and stuff. Jason: [12:54] What we're going to have a separate episode about how Scott knows that. Scot: [13:00] Okay cool so you did your wife see then you came back to Chicago and then maybe kind of update us like the bullet points to where we are today. Dhruv: [13:10] Yeah so once we you know got back to Chicago post why see we were fortunate enough to raise a seed round of a million dollars and so that allowed us to, you know take that top pill and hire a couple more engineers and hire a few more sales people and then expand the business so we opened up a warehouse in Chicago. Where we were headquartered and then we quickly expanded to New York as well so we added a location in Brooklyn New York. [13:38] And based on the progress that we had made you know in Chicago and New York and remember let's also limited so it requires Capital because you're opening up these fulfillment centers at the very beginning and you're also writing a lot of software which powers. The inside operations of the Fulfillment center and so we have to raise Capital simply by the nature of the business we are in also fulfillment I'm sure like, all your list has no it's not like a software business it's not an 80% gross margin business we have very tight margins, and so you are you require a lot of captains in this business to scale and so every couple of years we've had to raise Capital simply for us too, add investment dollars into building, either the software which powers are fulfillment centers or to open up our own fulfillment centers and so The quick summary of f Bob is today is that over the last five years or so, we raised you know close to 400 million dollars or so of venture capital, we've added you know be as close to 1,000 employees now a lot of it on the product and Engineering teams and sales and marketing team for us too. Add many emotions to our network but also write a lot of great stuff in which power is the back end of almost we know back-end systems of all of the e-commerce businesses using a platform. And the business strategically also has you know evolved where we don't now need to. [15:02] Operate our own fulfillment centers because we have four of our own social incentives each one in Chicago New York Texas and California so we kind of know how to run fulfillment centers we now partner with existing. 3pl Zone fulfillment centers who have empty capacity we bring in our software our know how our physical infrastructure into those locations, we bring them up to the shipbob standard and then we are able to Route our Merchants into those locations and so the business now requires a lot less capital in scaling the infrastructure side of things but not all of that Capital goes towards you know basically growing out the product capabilities and adding new Merchants into our Network. And we have fulfillment centers in the u.s. in Canada in UK Europe in Australia. And we of course added a lot of capabilities on a network all the parts on this wall so truly today now shipbob is a global. Omni-channel fulfillment solution for a Merchants where we can we are probably you know on power if you were starting an e-commerce business and you wanted to compete very effectively with Amazon and Walmart supply chain we are a great alternative. Scot: [16:13] Pickle the way I explain it let me see if this pencils for you so if someone asked me how this you know how this kind of what I would call your one of these next-generation fulfillment companies my pitch is you had these 3pls but they were really designed for you're kind of almost like a real estate thing where you go in and say Hey I want a corner of this fulfillment center and I'm going to lease it and do X Y & Z and then Amazon's Innovation was FBA where it was you know what much more aligned with the the e-commerce model of yes I want you to hold my goods but they're going to turn over quickly and I want to pay more of a per transaction kind of a thing, and I also want a lot of flexibility about how fast I can get products to Consumers so 3pls were in this kind of old world where they weren't really built that way so then part of what you guys did as you built your own fulfillment centers with this new model and then you can kind of take that model and put it into Old 3pls bring them up to kind of like the FBA level of above standard is that a fair summary of how you explain shipbob to other folks. Dhruv: [17:20] Yes that is very real articulated Scott I might actually use that going forward and and the only piece I would add to it is, of course you hit on the fast piece of it which is very relevant for a merchant, the second big element of wine Merchants choose us and our network is our ability to customize the unboxing experience which is unique for that particular brand so you know when you order something on Amazon it shows up in Amazon branded box for a merchant they want that unboxing experience to represent their brands you know. Ethos and the brand value so whether that's a custom box you know whether it could be eco-friendly material it could be custom gift notes accustomed shipping labels Etc the ability to customize that you know that. Transaction is very relevant for them it's almost on par alongside speed and and so that's the piece the second element of. Of customization I guess that should Bob's been able to unlock that I think FB it doesn't offer. Jason: [18:18] Got it and just to sort of clarify for listeners like so the goal then is it feels like it got shipped by the vendor right so it has whatever packaging the the manufacturer would want to use and a bill of lading that has their logo and those things on it as opposed to I ordered something from cuts and then I got an invoice from shipbob or something like that. Dhruv: [18:41] Yep exactly right we want to be. In the background you know where the Shopper is building a direct relationship with the brand and and the Shopper is agnostic to whether shipbob ships or whether the brand shifted. Jason: [18:58] Yep so and just to kind of frame this like back in that time frame the the idea of B2 C3 PLS was not common today it's a it's a pretty crowded Market space there's a lot of a lot of options but they're back then is got kind of pointed out like there was a thing called 3pls but they were more of like a B2B service really right. Dhruv: [19:22] That's right yep and so, the reason why even we were able to even build a business here is because majority of the 3pls out there were focused on the palette and Palette outside our transaction because most of their customers, but the bands who was selling predominantly in retail stores like Macy's no storm or Target Etc and so the concept of this High Velocity two to three units per order was very foreign to them, and all of the infrastructure was designed to store large number of palettes worth says having inventory in each has or in single units stored in bins and shelves. And so far from that perspective, the reason you know if you are doing pallets and pallid out like getting into e-commerce and then getting working with small and mid-sized e-commerce businesses where you don't make a lot of money for customer Justin. Pencil for these for these B2 B3 Tails because they were used to having. A small number of very large customers and then designing their entire operation inside the building's only for that few number of merchants because they would be able to make a you know the entire earnings ones from that limited set of merchants, word says it shipbob you know we we have a whole large number of merchants none of our Merchants you know are these are all birds or these massive Brands but these are growing emerging bands and. [20:50] Productized what is very much like been away service-oriented business. Jason: [20:55] Yep and so the profile of the typical shipbob customer is a start-up that's intending to sell direct to Consumer mostly through their own website is that a fair characterization. Dhruv: [21:08] That's how we got started his and so you know today that is definitely evolved as a capabilities have grown as well so, I would say like if you have to break down the merchants that we serve are so, on one end of the spectrum we have these Merchants you know they could be ought to pronounce what just getting started and they're doing anywhere from you know less than a hundred thousand dollars of annual revenue on the website all the way up to maybe a million dollars or so. So that's one and then we have Merchants who are from 1 to 15 million dollars of gmv, and they are predominantly selling on their own website but they're also selling on marketplaces like Amazon eBay Walmart. And then we have a mid-market segment of merchant these are relatively established Brands they are doing anywhere from 10 to 150 million dollars of gmv across all the different channels that they're selling on, and for them you know they are in e-commerce which is direct-to-consumer they're also in marketplaces but they're also in retailgeek, and so they and they also are thought getting to be Global and so for them, they use shipbob because under one umbrella they are they get not only great technology but the Fulfillment solution is able to carry it across all the different channels that they're selling on, and it allows them to manage inventory Under One Roof so in the. I guess the value proposition over the last six years for shipbob has definitely evolved as a capabilities have grown I've grown. Jason: [22:33] Makes total sense and I'm assuming so in my day job one of the the new categories of business that I see you like getting into direct fulfillment more are traditional products that used to exclusively sell through wholesale and in some cases these could be quite large companies that are used to sending pallets to Target and Walmart and now they're starting to sell some of their own goods from their own website and just like those those startups from 2014 they've got to figure out how to do the each's Fulfillment and I think they turn to folks like you as well now. Dhruv: [23:06] Yeah absolutely and so you know that's the exciting piece of direct-to-consumer is that. The technology and the infrastructure needed for you to start your own e-commerce business and be able to reach your consumers is has massively evolved so these traditional. You know Brands who are predominant retail now they are able to participate in e-commerce in the pretty meaningful way as well and they have access to Great infrastructure and. I think you know the. They've also realized that the infrastructure that they need it for their retail shipping doesn't look anywhere close to what they need for the direct to Consumer so on the record consumer side maybe you choose Chopper 5 for your front end platform. Are you choose to do a lot of your advertising and marketing on through Facebook Instagram Snapchat social media is the predominant digital marketing channel effectively. And then you choose shipbob for your fulfillment and and running your supply chain and maybe use a form or you know or care enough for your buy now pay later like those credit financing options and so this technology stack that you need to run your direct-to-consumer e-commerce business you know now exists, and is completely different from what you might have used for running a full wholesale retail operation. Jason: [24:27] Yep and I do want to just double-click on one other thing before we turn to two marketplaces and the Frenemy situation there but the so a couple of your advantages why you develop this software to make the Fulfillment center much more efficient than traditional ones were and obviously efficiency is a huge differentiator and in the Fulfillment you you enable all this customization and personalization which is a better match for The Branding that all of these clients want to do one of the other things that I think of is. 3pls from that era that was sort of problematic and that kind of Amazon disrupted is like they used to make you manage your own inventory so if they had to. Fulfillment centers you as the merchant had to decide how much good you are sending to the West Coast and how much good you are sending to the east coast and and you sort of had to do all those things and. Amazon through their fulfillment by Amazon kind of took that that that Inventory management burden away from some of their their merchants and sort of did all that for them and did the load balancing and all those sorts of things so do you do that like you now it sounds like you've got four of your own fulfillment centers and a bunch of virtual fulfillment Centers do you do all of that sort of AI based inventory allocation for your customers as well. Dhruv: [25:56] Yep absolutely so and that's sort of I guess we can break that inventory allocation into two parts so one is choosing where in the network, to send your products from your manufacturer. [26:08] And so that's based on you know we provide all of that information upfront to a merchant base where you know based on historical purchase data that we captured from all the different sales channels that you connect into Shabbat we can be have a model that, Delta to fairly well as to how much inventory to store in which parts of the network, and so that's and so you can but we don't necessarily mandate that because for these brands you know they want to be one them to have the ability to make those decisions for themselves we provide them with all of the information and if they choose to they can have shipbob distribute that inventory for themselves for them or they can do it directly from the manufacturer my following our data you know that we give out to them so that's on the first half of like sending like the right amount of inventory to the right location so that's a little bit of a optionality for these bands. And then the second part of it where we do a lot of the work ourselves is once we start getting these orders into our platform once you buy something from our, from a branch choosing which fulfillment center that particular order gets routed to and what shipping carrier is used for that particular transaction that is something that we that we definitely do you know in the house and so that is a pretty important element of it because as a brand you might off be offering two day shipping on your checkout page. [27:32] But you actually don't want you know to be using Ups 2 day or FedEx overnight to do that today transaction because that will be very expensive, and sociable because we've captured a lot of far, carriers performance data over time we have a pretty built out model which tells us hey if we even if you use this local Regional carrier for this particular order we have a very high likelihood it will get delivered in 2 days or less and we don't have to pay for a UPS guarantee today service and so we are able to bring down the cost of two days significantly down at this almost the same price point as a USB as ground shipping which is a total which is the cheapest form of shipping simply by placing inventory in better you know better placement of inventory and a fulfillment centers but also choosing where which fulfillment center ships that particular order and what shipping carrier we use for the transaction, for that was a little long answer but I think that is sort of the secret, Elemental why brands of any size are able to offer a two-day next a sort of a shipping experience on the checkout page. Scot: [28:37] Yeah if that's helpful at when I've talked to some people about this kind of stuff they're always like how hard could this be like this comes up in the Shopify so a lot of Shopify Wall Street folks you know they'll say well why is this so hard and you know one of my favorite things about e-commerce is going to tour warehouses because once you get inside of warehoused you realize that this pretty complicated and the way I explain it is once you've committed to a. [29:09] Yo an asset like a warehouse and all the people in everything then it becomes an optimization problem in optimizing warehouses is pretty complicated right so let's let's take you guys have X number of customers in a fulfillment center let's just keep it one of the ones you own and operate to make it even simpler and you know there's a there's a bazillion questions like how do you if you take customer 1 through 100 do you intermix there things how do you do the packaging you talked about how do you how tall are the shelves do you use conveyor belts do you do two floors or one floor and your fulfillment center so what's fun about that is an engineer there's a lot of fun problems to solve their and it's a lot, you know your explanation of the shipping is interesting because that's like yet another one so a lot of people feel like this is too easy is really easy and then they kind of run up against the the the hardness of it and they kind of have to step back and redo it do you have a point of view of. You know what Shopify kind of did it seem like they tried to do a software-only kind of a solution and it kind of didn't work and now they're trying to get more involved in it and you have a point of view on that. Dhruv: [30:18] Yeah for sure but you framed it really well Scott which is. Once you you know once you go inside the Fulfillment center the number of problems of that that you can potentially solve or almost endless, and the reason it's important to attack these optimization problems is fundamentally you know fulfillment is not a software only problem. And it doesn't come with 80% gross margins and so it's in your best interest to optimize once you get to certain scale because every cent and dollar you share from those operating costs is a dollar that flows to your bottom line alternatively is a dollar that you can then reduce you know your cause to your brand which then allows them to reduce their fulfillment costs and that way allows them to offer free shipping which then drives, you know more sales on the website which then drives you no more orders into your platform which allows you to get to scale faster. And so optimization is you know is key for you to be operating at the lowest cost possible because there are advantages of doing so. And so there are a lot of different ways to get to Optimum to try to optimize but if you don't own and operate your fulfillment centers at least the onset you simply don't know what problems to solve, and so at shipbob you know what I believe worked really well in our favor is because we operated our own fulfillment centers we saw firsthand. [31:45] What are the consequences of the choices that we are making. And that involves you know the physical infrastructure do we mix products of different merchants in the same aisle where in the, we're in the Fulfillment Centers do we place the fast-moving skus do we take the loaf slowest moving skills and put them at the back of the Fulfillment centers away from the rest of the merchants inventory or do we place them high up in the, under racking system how do we think about Labor planning is Mondays. [32:15] 20% higher than Friday so do we need to staff up in the morning shift Etc and they are all and material handling and and Idol walking is such a big. Cost of the Fulfillment centers operations how do we try to minimize that and at what scale there are hundreds of these optimization decisions that we've had to make over the last seven years, which then have been productized in our software in our warehouse management system which then now is being deployed across these Partners sites, and so I think if we were to to you know jump ahead and just do our partners sites that we don't own and operate we don't own or operate on a day-to-day basis we would have missed out on all of these optimization decisions that we made over the last seven years which then allows us to operate, at a much lower operating costs than any of the competition so I think Shopify I don't know, you know the products are actually there but I think they might have tried to short-circuit their way into running virtual fulfillment centers to early without having learned the lessons of our without having experienced the lessons of running your own building which I think they might be course-correcting now. Scot: [33:25] Yeah it gives you the ability to go to a 3pl and say hey here's your you know 3pls are kind of V1 and you guys are like V10 so you can go in there and say take this section do it this way here's how you know here's the barcode reader you need to use yours there's like all this stuff that has to come together seamlessly with the software to kind of execute and you guys have figured all that out and you can just kind of plop it right into the 3pl I imagined. Dhruv: [33:50] That's right yeah exactly out pitch to these existing 3pls is that you have this unused capacity. This is like a warehouse in a box that we are providing you and if you follow you know the product or the our operating protocol then you will be able to make X dollars and order or Y dollars a square foot, Which is higher than what you are achieving now and by the way you don't have to spend any money on sales and marketing and servicing because shabab you know these are shipbob merchants and so you should be able to make. You know. You should be able to generate a return on that on that space in a relatively short amount of time which makes it a pretty interesting proposition for these existing 3pls who want to participate in e-commerce but they necessarily don't have the infrastructure. All the capital to do so as yet. Scot: [34:44] Interesting cool so give us an idea of your scale so I saw on crunch basis it says you've raised over 300 million so congrats on that the I've been raising capital in this kind of more asset heavy World in it's not not easy so so kudos to you for being able to fund us at the scale you have maybe like how many packages a day are you guys processing or anything you can tell us around scale would be kind of interesting. Dhruv: [35:10] For sure I won't be able to get to the. Exact are approximate taxes but here he is maybe a good proxy you know we have close to. 30 or so fulfillment centers in our Network today we are adding one fulfillment center a month that's the relative scale and majority of the reason why we're adding these fulfillment centers that are rapid clip. Is because we are you know reaching. Pasty in these fulfillment centers fairly quickly and the amount of space that we take inside of a fulfillment center is anywhere from. 30 to 40,000 square feet on the lower end as much as 90 200,000 square feet on the higher end so that's the sort of every sight every node in the network represents at least you know maybe call it average 50,000 square feet and we have close to 30 of them. Scot: [36:04] Furcal and then it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show if we didn't at least throw you an Amazon question. So so it's easy to kind of you know again for someone to kind of look at this and say hey you're competing with FBA and I I get that you know. Amazon's talked about doing you know a you know just non-market play Style Style fulfillment. And then but then and then they've also talked about yeah you can use your own packaging and but you know my understanding is they're not really doing that at scale do you do you guys feel like you compete against them or do you see them the other thing that also blows people's minds a lot of time is software and sinners like you guys operate frequently will ship stuff using Amazon's API so that it can be prime eligible which is also kind of a so-so the 3pl the shipping partner can be Merchant fulfilled Prime which thus means their products are prime eligible so maybe talk a little bit about how you feel about Amazon. Dhruv: [37:03] Yeah for sure and yes you're right so we do ship inventory sometimes into Amazon Fulfillment centers as well for, for the fpaa. [37:15] And some of our some of our Merchants do also you know use the what you call the seller fulfilled Prime option but more on your question on the do we compete with FPA I think it is servicing a slightly. Different segments of the market and so if you talk to most of our brands, you know they were they won't really say that we trust Amazon with all of our data. And so for these brands that we serve as passing that customer information or who their buyers are, to Amazon seems like a big business dress because Amazon competes with them, you know on the Amazon to the Amazon Basics line or you know placing the product slightly differently on the the listing speed and sector so they want to build a supply chain, and demand you know sort of website which allows them to control their own destiny without having to rely on. On Amazon which could potentially be problematic for them down the road. And so in that context they want to stay away from Amazon as much as possible of course they also do sometimes have Amazon listings because Amazon is such a great. Aggregator of demand that maybe it has a lower cost of acquisition than having to do it yourself on your website but you don't want to rely on Amazon for. [38:40] Majority of your sales and so in you know under that, through contacts then we don't necessarily compete with Amazon FBA because for these Brands using FPA is not even an option and so and two because then we are there under this ethos of like if I have. Slightly Superior brand and my brand is represented through all aspects of my branding website supply chain I can I can be a better business, then you know shipbob stability to provide us a plethora of customization options, is a real value sell because and I know our ability to match you know this two-day Prime life experience. I think it's a real value add and the third aspect of it if I may add is as these Brands grow larger being able to have inventory globally is. Something which I don't think is possible with FB and fourth is if you're also getting into retail, you know doing being able to ship Ballads of inventory to these retail distribution centers again is not an option with fpso if a brand is thinking about their supply chain as a whole I think shipbob FB is probably not a solution. Jason: [39:51] Yeah so that really makes sense I'm kind of curious how this is going to continue to evolve I mean it seems like there's some risk that some of these big retailers like or marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart might eventually start selling their fulfillment as as a third party service that could potentially compete in the 3pl area and I think the the FedEx is and UPS is of the world are leaning more into it as well is. Is the future going to be kind of all of these different Services kind of colliding and meaning in the middle or how do you see the future of this industry playing out. Dhruv: [40:26] Yeah that's a hard question to answer, because yes you know e-commerce is growing so quickly that there are so many Greenfield opportunities for different companies. To play a part in so but I think each one probably you know like this industry benefits from scale. And so and of course this is a hard business because you're dealing with physical products and physical inventory and physical assets. And so I don't know if the industry would sort of all of us will start doing each other's work simply because it's by doing our core businesses by itself pretty hard and getting to scale in our Core Business is very relevant so. [41:07] I think UPS and FedEx might I think might have dabbled an e-commerce fulfillment but I think majority of the business still very much remains around transportation and and same for shipbob I think majority of our business is around fulfillment we are looking at ways of adding value to a merchant Base by taking parts of the transportation and seeing if we have enough density on certain routes, that can be that can allow us to reduce the overall fulfillment calls for a Merchants but again I think there's so much you know there's so much to be done in this space that if you. Lose focus you can lose the advantage that you have right now so you know I and and businesses are able to grow, simply by focusing in the core business area so for us at least you know it's mostly fulfillment and maybe pieces of Transportation sprinkled in. Jason: [41:58] Well that seems like a toy reasonable perspective and it certainly is going to be fun to watch but I think that's going to be where we have to leave it today because as per usual we have used up all of our allotted time as always if this is episode was helpful to you we sure would appreciate that five-star review but we really appreciate your time today and sharing a little bit more about shipbob with us. Dhruv: [42:21] Now thank you so much Jason and Scott for having me this was a good conversation. Scot: [42:25] Dexter even if folks want to follow you online do you pontificate or should they just follow the shipbob socials. Dhruv: [42:32] The shipbob Socialist would be a great great dad. Scot: [42:35] I know I would advocate for you doing more would love to read anything you write about the industry as it's been a good discussion and you know at least Jason I would read it so we can guarantee that. Dhruv: [42:47] It's great to read as I got I got it. Scot: [42:49] Boom and Jason's mom she always follows Oliver stuff stuff. Dhruv: [42:54] I can convince my mom as well. Jason: [42:59] The audience is growing by the minute well thanks very much everyone and until next time happy commercing.  

IN THIS EPISODE, WE COVER: [3:21] – Intro to Paul [4:56] – Efficiency in sales [7:04] – The importance of a mentor  [8:36] – The biggest surprise in Paul's career [12:38] – The dangers of control [15:09] – Storytelling [19:00] – Thinking many steps ahead  MORE ON PAUL:Paul has been a leader for over 25 years starting/working for companies that support and empower small businesses to grow and scale. As an entrepreneur he co-founded Integrated Telemanagement, a telecom reseller, in 1994 and co-founded Employer Services Corporation, a human capital provider (payroll service) in 1999. In 2011 Mr Rosen joined On Deck, a fintech company which was the first company to provide small business loans online with automated underwriting. The company grew from a 15M run rate to 370M over his 6 years as Chief Sales Officer. In 2018 Paul joined ShipBob as the Chief Revenue Officer, which has grown by almost 10X since joining. Mr Rosen is an advocate of servant leadership. MORE ON RAMPED: Check us out at www.rampedcareers.com Interested in becoming a Ramped Professional? Sign up here: https://rampedcareers.com/candidate-form/ Interested in becoming a Ramped Corporate Partner? Email us at sales@rampedcareers.com

Typically, any business be it online or offline seeks to deliver their service in the most efficient way possible, getting the customer in, getting them their order, and getting them out so you can repeat the cycle at a high rate. Anything that got in the way, or slowed down this process, is called "friction", and it's the big bad F-word of the commercial world. Contrary to this widely held belief though, not all business related friction is bad. That's what Phillip Jackson found out when he and Rightpoint set out to study customer behaviour and buying habits. Good Friction Vs Bad Friction There are two types of business friction, generally defined as Good Friction and Bad Friction. Good Friction - Something in the buying process that allows a customer to engage further with your brand a product, without interrupting their purchasing of the product Bad Friction - Something in the buying process that slows the process without adding any value to the customer in return, creating "speedbumps" between them and completing their purchase "How do I tell good friction from bad?"  Where friction is placed in the shopping process is a good indicator, and knowing how shoppers approach your customer support experience is the best way to determine if you've applied too much or too little friction. The vast majority of post-purchase customers contact service for two reasons: Delivery questions Return questions There's a smaller but potentially helpful third reason though;           3. Can you help me with more information? Whereas any interruption that addresses the first two before checkout will be seen as bad friction, slowing the process to provide unwanted annoyance, one that provides the details of the third (accounting for around a third itself of all customers) before the customer either checks out, or has to return themselves to ask the detailed extra questions, is good friction, helping them to make a better purchase and have a better overall experience. Examples of Customer Experience  Design Centric Friction Pop-up assistants, preferred by almost 30% of all customers, are an excellent example of how to use good friction, and how it could result in bad friction.  If a customer arrives at your store, and is unsure what to get, a pop-up assistant, like an in-store assistant, can be very helpful in pointing in the  right direction. It is a form of friction, because you have interrupted their shopping flow, but it's good friction because it has actually accelerated their buying experience, delivered through a positive brand engagement. This means that the shopper not only has what they want faster, but now trust your company a little more. If however the pop-up needlessly interrupts someone going through the checkout, product in cart with their shopping experience nearly finished, this previously good example breaks bad. The customer has now been slowed unnecessarily, and will carry a negative association not only with your product, but with the feature itself. Another good use of these chat features, which can be either automated or human-driven, is to offer customers ways that they could fix any problems they have themselves while waiting for escalation, empowering them to feel responsible for their own good outcome with your product and brand, with even less needed interaction or engagement. The happier the customer is, the better their customer experience through either applied good friction or a noted lack of bad friction, the more likely they'll return to buy again. Our Sponsors https://www.omnisend.com/rolledup/ (Omnisend) - https://www.shipbob.com/rolledup (ShipBob) - https://gorgias.grsm.io/pitstop (Gorgias)

'Optimizing your Technical SEO' may sound like a big, scary and expensive process, with with a little help from a few handy apps, it's no more than another step towards your traffic goals. Here are Ben's top 5 take-aways for Technical SEO 1:22 Product Schema. Google doesn't treat all search results the same, and presents them to users with clearly market favourites. Those golden-starred front-runners in the search response are using a piece of code that's available to you, usually through your review app, that syncs the product reviews in your shop with Google. Once installed, you can expect to see results within days. 3:20 Broken Internal & External Links. If Google can't follow a link into, around or out of your store, then it's not going to include any of the affected pages in search results. Use a broken-link-checker app frequently to make sure your links are active, internally & externally. 5:28 Orphaned Pages. No blog post or content should stand alone, and if Google can't find a way to a  page on your site, it will never get traffic. Be sure that every page is linked to at least 5 other pages on your site, either with related links in the content or standard links to shop sections 6:34 Broken JS Code. The bane of many merchants, broken JS code are parts of old apps and features still left in your shop's site that can cause endless errors for you and your users, and disrupt Google's web crawlers. Make sure all previous apps have always been properly uninstalled and fully removed with an online scanner. 8:05 Links To MyShopify.com URL. Every Shopify store gets an initial MyShopify.com URL that hosts your content until you've purchased and set up your final brand URL, and often these will be used to link pages together when building a site. Make sure after you're done that you relink all of these back to your brand URL, or MyShopify.com will eat your traffic. Our Sponsors https://www.omnisend.com/rolledup/ (Omnisend) - https://www.shipbob.com/rolledup (ShipBob) - https://gorgias.grsm.io/pitstop (Gorgias)

The biggest, and final heist of the season, Mt. Gox. In 2014, they were handling over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions, but they weren't secure, and had over 850,000 bitcoins go missing. Was it a horrible downfall, or the perfect crime? If you're looking for a secure warehouse to keep ship and store your goods, http://shipbob.com/rolledup (Shipbob) has you covered.

A trio of Canadians robbed over 140 banks, spending no more than 90 seconds in each one! They've been featured in movies, TV shows, and books. From Ottawa to San Diego, the Stopwatch Gang left their mark. If you're looking to store your products safely and securely - check out http://shipbob.com/rolledup (Shipbob).

Most people think of young guys in old timey photos sticking up banks when they hear heists - but in 2015 a group of senior citizens broke into a diamond vault in what would turn into the most exciting heist in London history. If you're looking for somewhere secure to store your watch brand, make sure you check out http://shipbob.com/rolledup (Shipbob).

From stealing pants and pies as a teenager, to high tailing it to South America, this is the story of Butch Cassidy. Hear the story that got started with a pie. Original Heists is presented by http://shipbob.com/rolledup (Shipbob)

On a cool August night in 1963, a Royal Mail train was brought to a halt, and robbed of £2.6M (Over $75M USD today) in the most famous train robbery in history. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of the Ulsterman (his identity revealed at the end) and they were brought down by a Monopoly board. Hear their incredibly story of luck and fortune in this episode of Original Heists. Original Heists is presented by http://shipbob.com/rolledup (Shipbob).

On a quiet 1983 night in Jeruesleum, the L.A. Mayer Museum had 106 watces and timepieces stolen, including a watch that took over 40 years to build for Marie Antonette. Hear how they went missing, and were discovered in this episode of Original Hesits. Original Heists is presented by http://shipbob.com/rolledup (Shipbob). Keep your inventory secure from watches to hot sauces.

Is your B2B sales team missing revenue targets? Frustrated with long sales cycles? Not closing deals after demos? How about new hires?  Are they ramping too slowly?  Frontline managers struggling to impact quarterly performance?  Then Consider ClozeLoop. www.clozeloop.comPaul has spent the last 20 years in senior leadership positions for high growth venture backed businesses. Mr. Rosen joined E-chx in 2003 as the sales leader which was a startup payroll service provider which at the time had 3 sales people and 100 clients. When he left in 2011, E-chx had over 10,000 customers making it one of the largest independent payroll providers in the United States. In 2011 Paul joined On Deck, a fintech online business lender, as the Chief Sales Officer which at the time was a 10M business with 10 sales people. On Deck was taken public on the NYSE in December of 2014, and when Mr. Rosen exited in June of 2017, had grown to over 200 sales people and close to 400M in revenues. Paul joined ShipBob, a tech/fulfillment company, in 2018 as the Chief Revenue Officer. 2021 revenues are projected over 200M and roughly a 6X increase from 2018.