For e-commerce brands that may own or lease warehouse space but lack the resources for full-fledged warehouse management systems, ShipBob has released a solution.
Its Merchant Plus is a stand-alone warehouse management system (WMS) that helps these merchants benefit from a fulfillment operations platform while benefiting from ShipBob’s global network. The solution provides access to ShipBob’s carrier infrastructure, support team and fulfillment experts. In addition, brands using the WMS also gain access to ShipBob’s suite of supply chain tools and access to ShipBob’s warehouse network in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia.
“As an industry leader that is constantly working to bring more value to the e-commerce logistics ecosystem, we are proud to launch our Merchant Plus solution,” said Dhruv Saxena, co-founder and CEO of ShipBob. “With this new platform, we are now giving businesses access to our WMS to continue to fulfill in-house, while also having the option to have ShipBob fulfill orders in other regions or countries. Merchant Plus really marries all of the benefits of fulfilling in-house and leveraging ShipBob for other supply chain solutions, allowing businesses to achieve scale, efficiency and control over both their inventory and the customer experience like never before.”
According to ShipBob, brands deploying Merchant Plus have been able to get their fulfillment teams up to speed after as little as one week of training. The solution also provides customizable pick and pack workflows such as cluster and batch picking to increase efficiencies, customizable setup options for on-the-floor inventory and enhanced transparency to manage warehouse employees, orders and inventory from anywhere, while driving operational improvements.
ShipBob said that Merchant Plus was piloted with several e-commerce brands running their own warehouses and the results found they spent 25% less time on fulfillment and reduced their error rate by as much as 35%.
The company noted additional benefits, including:
- Better visibility into real-time inventory levels and improved transparency in operations.
- A dashboard for tracking shipments, bridging the gap between operations and support teams.
- A variety of carriers and services for standard and expedited shipping across domestic and international deliveries and other cross-border solutions.
- Tools for managing and shipping orders and returns.
- The ability to fulfill DTC and B2B orders (including EDI compliance with major retailers).
- Enhanced analytics and reporting capabilities to have a more complete view of their businesses.
- Seamless integrations with e-commerce platforms, online marketplaces, EDI providers, help desks, returns management platforms and other tools in ShipBob’s app store.
In June, ShipBob announced an integration with customer platform Klaviyo. The tie-up offers joint customers of the companies a unified post-purchase and shipping experience, ShipBob said. Klaviyo’s platform collects all of a company’s customer data as it is updated in real time and makes that information accessible in the same platform used for sending email and SMS messages. Integrated with ShipBob’s platform, the new offering will lead to new opportunities for customer engagement, ShipBob said.
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