- Michael Sene
- Director of Sales at Deliverr
Bio:
Michael Sene is the Director of Sales with Deliverr. He works with more than a dozen fulfillment specialists, oversees the onboarding of all new sellers, and helps those sellers increase revenue through current and new sales channels.
Sponsors:
Links:
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk with Michael Sene about how to ship today or next day without breaking the bank. This is a business e-commerce episode 159.
Charles (00:19):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I’m Charles and I’m here today with Michael Sene. Michael is the director of sales at deliver where they help retailers get faster next day or two day shipping on all their products. I think they’re doing something new here, and it’s pretty interesting to see how, as a independent retailer, you can actually get next day, two day shipping to try to really compete with the big guys like an Amazon or a Walmart. And this is something that’s becoming more and more important in the game of retail. Now folks are expecting it and it’s something that people are just becoming very used to. So they’ve really changed the model they’re using technology to do this. I think it’s kind of interesting chat to kind of go into how they’re doing this and to put some thought into where as a retailer, you want to be now, and in the future, when maybe the expectation goes from two days to one day or one hour, wherever it is. And he kind of talks about that and kind of get you in that mind space of thinking, what do I want to be now and in the future. So it’s going to show, so, Hey, Michael, how are you doing today? I’m
Michael (01:25):
Doing great. I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.
Charles (01:27):
Yeah. Awesome. I have you on, I think this topic is very timely on fast shipping. This is, this is the era of the whole shipping pocalypse where we’ve seen a lot of people struggle with this. So it’s good to kind of talk through this.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So we’re talking. Oh yeah. It’s it’s
Charles (01:45):
I think Amazon, especially this year has kind of got us all addicted to like quick shipping, right? So two day shipping, we talk about that next day shipping. And I think a lot of retailers want to provide this on their own and everyone’s kind of struggling to, how do I get from my standard ups ground? You know, that could take a week and try to like, bring that down to close it, to match Amazon or compete. And you can pay that you can pay for air obviously, but doing that affordably, I think it’s kind of a trick and I think you have some experience with us, right?
Michael (02:17):
Yeah, I do. I think you bring up a great point just to start. When you think about the problem is you need to do it at a low rate and really fast. And I think everyone’s trying to tackle this problem from your big retailer to your smaller Shopify merchants, your e-commerce merchants on marketplace. Everyone’s trying to solve this. I think the issue is they’re taking at it the wrong approach, right? When you think about it to get today at a low rate, your items need to be in at least four to five warehouses to get next day and same day, your items need to be in 10 to 18 different warehouses. And a lot of large retailers are overly invested in their current setup. That’s for retail, right? And the position of their FCS are not in the right places. So, you know, getting to that same day or next day is a, is a massive challenge of capital that you would have to invest in.
Michael (03:07):
And your smaller merchant, you know, naturally wants to do this, but doesn’t have the capability. And then when you think about companies that are offering this, you really have, Amazon is the only one. And when you think about what deliver has is we have an asset light model. So we’re able to expand a lot quicker. We noticed this problem. You can’t just throw money at this problem. It has to be something where you connect a lot of FCS together, together, a lot of warehouses, and you create that network to be able to access next day and same day and offer a very low fulfillment rate. And that’s the only way you can really tackle it. Either you have an asset light model or an extremely asset heavy model. And the other thing is you need lots of carriers. The traditional model is you have one, one or two carrier agreements, ups or FedEx, the norm. When you think about Amazon, they have sortation centers and the item leaves those. And it goes directly to the person they don’t, you know, utilize one or two carriers. Essentially every truck is its own carrier. And so you need to address it at that length as well on the carrier end and for deliver. We we’re fortunate enough to work with at least nine carriers and we’re adding more regional carriers national carriers, and that allows us to get lower rates and access that, you know, fast fulfillment that that people want.
Charles (04:22):
Hm. Okay. So I want to make sure a couple of terms out FCS fulfillment centers, farrowing, that kind of missed that part. And then we said asset level, asset heavy versus asset life we’re talking fulfillment centers is like having physical, like distribution in your like owning the distribution chain. Yeah.
Michael (04:37):
I mean, when you think about a traditional fulfillment company, you’re tasked with the decision of expanding, building a warehouse buying property, that’s extremely asset heavy. You have to hire the folks. And, and right now there’s a lot of warehouses in the country that are willing to, you know, work into a network like deliver and partner in a sense where we can actually utilize them into a network that we control end to end. The best way to put it is, think about Uber. When you had the taxis, you had multiple different taxi companies and what did Uber do? They connected all the drivers together. So that way, when you requested one, you were getting a driver that was in your neighborhood, not 30 miles away, like the ages of the taxi, where you would have to call someone and wait an hour.
Charles (05:20):
If you’re an independent retail, though, you’re trying to string together these different fulfillment centers. You know, if they want, let’s say they want to do it themselves. Is there even a way to do that? Like, you know, cause you’re sightseeing, like you could go to each fulfillment center and when you said, actually let those numbers you at the beginning, how many would you need to do next day?
Michael (05:38):
You need to, you need to do at least 10 to 18 warehouses to get a low rate next day fulfillment. Right? Could you air, you could air ship it, but they’re just never there. Right. So, yeah.
Charles (05:52):
So you’re saying 10 to 18 days, and that gets you taking the same item 10 days in to spread around the country, enough of places where you could basically do ground from any point to that.
Michael (06:03):
Correct. All carriers ground. So like when I order an item off deliver any of our sellers, we’re using the liver, we have an I’m here in the Bay area. There’s a warehouse less than 50 miles away. So that items typically coming from that warehouse and I can get it tomorrow.
Charles (06:17):
Yeah. I think this is probably the one thing where the one competitor, Amazon, when you say Walmart where their fulfillment centers are just their stores. And I think there’s some statistic where like 85% of the American population is within like 20 minutes of a Walmart. Like some like amazing. So like they literally, you know, they have, I don’t know how many thousands of these, and they’re basically using those as their fulfillment centers, but unless you have that sort of network, like how as an independent retailer, are you literally just copying out your product to, you know, 10 different warehouses across the country?
Michael (06:49):
Yeah. I mean, well currently a lot of retailers are still using one or two and air shipping, maybe eating the costs, maybe not even offering free two day or free next day because the margins just aren’t there. I think everyone wants to, and I think your larger retailers at least have the space. You think about, you know, free whole foods today, two hour delivery, they blocked off those, you know, stores to actually do that. You have that section, a lot of retailers do have space that they could potentially do that doesn’t solve the carrier issue. Right. You still have to tap into multiple carriers. So you’re still kind of limited, but you’re every other e-commerce retailer has, you know, you’re your only option is really to go through a fulfillment provider like deliver or really a traditional one that maybe has two or three or four different FCS. Now that will. And when I say FCS, I mean warehouses. And even if you do that, you’re kind of set up for today. But the question you should have is in 2021, am I set up for next day, come the next year, right? So you may get your fulfillment set up for today, but you know, we’re all expecting next day to be the norm. It already is on Amazon. And so how do you keep up? You have to have your item and more warehouses and more carriers.
Charles (07:59):
So why, why do the carriers come into play so much? I get the warehouses, right? Like, so you have to just spread around more, just physically closer to folks. But the carrier thing, is it just because there’s regional carriers that are cheaper than the big guys,
Michael (08:10):
That’s one point sometimes they’re more affordable. Sometimes incurrent areas they’re more reliable. If you look at last year, a lot of folks were hit by shipping again. And because maybe they relied on one or two carriers and when those carriers get delayed, how are you utilizing other carriers? And so I believe that we, you know, in the future are moving towards a model where you can have 50 carriers, a hundred carriers, maybe the concept of a carrier may not even be what you normally think of as a FedEx or ups. Right. and you saw Amazon do that right? With, with, with carriers as they expanded their network. Right now you see the Amazon van, but everyone realizing there was the time where it wasn’t the Amazon ban, you had flex and some you know, places they were utilizing to carry packages.
Charles (09:00):
Yeah. I think they still have random, like the random dude that comes up to your house and you’re like, Oh, is this guy come up to like hug me? And you’re like, Oh, here’s your Amazon package? And like, Oh, okay.
Michael (09:10):
And the other day it was like packed to the brim with Amazon packages and they were delivering. Right. So you know, and I think they control that, that end to end. Right. So they can utilize those. And, and I think it’s fair to say that we have to accept to get to next day, same day, let’s call it same hour, potentially at some point you’re going to have to utilize that kind of network.
Charles (09:29):
Okay. So the goal, but the kind of, the name of the game is just getting the, getting the items physically as close as you can so that you can pretty much do ground as many orders as you can.
Michael (09:37):
Right? Yeah. Got it. So it was note on now, too, it’s a part of our network. What we’ve seen is it’s, it’s a positioning of inventory problem, right. Because one of the questions we always get is, well, even though I split my inventory, you guys are going to put them, how do I inform you where it goes, if I know more orders are here and less orders are in this region, well, when you connect to a product like ours, we analyze that data. So when you’re creating an inbound, we’re actually deciding where they’re going. Because it is a product placement issue, right? W w you don’t want to send the same amount to the LA area that you would send to, you know, maybe Texas, you want us to split it up accordingly. And so for us, we have merchants who just say, I’m going to send in one month of inventory, you know, and we split it across our, our network.
Charles (10:26):
How do you guys determine that? Right? Because let’s say I’m selling, right? Let’s say I’m sending a thousand bathing suits. And I’m sitting here in Boston. They’re probably not showing up very many at like a Boston warehouse right now. They’re probably all going South. Like, how do, how would you know, going into it, if you have product knowledge to understand, Hey, they’re selling, you know, a warm weather product, or how do you actually do that analysis?
Michael (10:47):
There’s a few things. One when you’re connecting to delivery, you’re connecting your sales channel. So we are analyzing data. Historically, we don’t have historical. We actually create a product roadmap in the first 30 days to understand, Hey, where should this item be placed on future replenishments? And we’ll probably utilize data like population density, if we have no historicals things like that, right. If we have any data on the SKU, we’ll try to configure that way. The beauty of delivery is we’re charging one fixed rate. So the onus is on us to position it accordingly, right? If we don’t position it accordingly, we pay more at the end and, and the, you know, the merchant pays the same price. So it’s an interesting concept, right? Where are you at a flat rate? And we’re, we’re going to be the ones who position control at end to end very similar to Uber. Right now, you get one flat rate. They tell you what it costs, and they get you the lowest possible rate. And that’s why people like it.
Charles (11:41):
So you guys, so just to go deliver a little bit, cause it’s kind of interesting. So you guys are actually taking basically the risk on with an, his, an order and you know, it’s going to be five bucks. And if it’s six, like if you guys pay the six and that’s the end, but the retailer, they know that costs going into us. Exactly. Oh, very bad. How do you, like, how do you actually achieve that? Or how can a retailer do to do this themselves? Or is it just, you guys are basically like doing enough of this, where you can absorb that risk.
Michael (12:15):
We’ve done enough of it. We have enough data to understand what carrier reliability times are, what carrier rates are when you combine multiple carrier rates. I mean, you just think about your average, let’s call it package, going from Dallas to Chicago. We’re analyzing that trend every hour, every day, understanding when that’s reliable on ground, when it’s not what the rates are. And so we can come up with an all inclusive fixed costs, be very confident about that cost and pass the forth. A good example of this is last quarter packages. We upped our rates 20 cents across the board. And the reason why is we knew we could absorb that cost and balance it out. And so it’s just a lot, it’s a data issue and a placement issue.
Charles (12:59):
Yeah. I feel like the data thing, I always talk to retailers who get this, where you get your you know, ups and FedEx built into the month. And you’re like, Oh, this should have cost me, you know, $8. And you look and they’re like, Oh, it’s like a fuel surcharge. And like a, something, something surcharge, you know, like, like what are the ones like 38 cents, but one’s like $4. And you’re like, what are these fees? If you have a breakdown, it’s pretty much like, you don’t know what the Bill’s going to be, just get at the end of month. You’re like, all right, whatever. Like, I guess they’re right. You can’t, and you can’t really argue with that. Cause like, I don’t know if they sent me a fuel surcharge fee. So you guys just kinda like deal with all those random fees and blend them into somehow.
Michael (13:33):
Yeah. Well, what’s interesting too, like about our service on the fast fulfillment side, if you, you know, we have two rates for today and the reason why you have a fixed today, which is guaranteed, if you want it, you know, we’ll air ship it. If it needs to be. And it’s a higher today rate, but we have our most popular product, which is just a website today or similar to, you know, Walmart today or is similar to the prime badge. Right? When you think about that, that badge changes depending on where you’re at on prime. If you look at one item in Arizona versus one item in California, the speed will be different. We’re doing the same thing with that badge across people’s sites. So they will often take advantage of our badging software. We’ll give them a lower fixed rate, but the understanding is that we’re going to do everything we can to have that badge turned on on your site.
Michael (14:23):
And we’re going to control that. And in cases where we can guarantee that we’ll get it tomorrow, we’ll actually switch it to tomorrow and you don’t even have to pay a one day rate. You’ll pay a two day rate. Our goal is to get that package as quickly as possible, because if we do that, you’ll get more orders. And if you get more orders, you win, we win. We all win. Right? So that’s the name of the game. So a lot of people take advantage of what we call our fast tag product, which is we control the end to end of what your buyer sees. So they’ll either see today, next day or, or they won’t see any badge. If we have any issues come up that we have to pull the badge for, for like, let’s say a day like today, maybe there’s an issue in one city. We’ll pull the badge.
Charles (15:04):
That’s yeah. That’s neat. Cause you always, with the Amazon, for example, they have a one of the fulfillment centers is quite literally like down the street. So I know here, if I’m logged in from here, I see like same day shipping, but if I’m traveling and I was like, Oh, this is product same day. And then I realized, Oh, it’s cause I live next to a fulfillment center. So it’s just, yeah, like quite literally just changes based on where I am and yeah, you see, and you see that when you play with that, that depending on you moving the country drastically changes from same day to whatever. It goes way farther out. Why do you see three pills? Not doing a lot of this themselves. Cause like there’s been three pills around for a while that have these networks and they kind of, you know, maybe they had a dozen warehouses. Why do you kind of see other three pills not offering this? Or are they willing to this model?
Michael (15:51):
Yeah. I mean, I know we have, we’ve heard from some three PLS that I’ve always kind of said, Hey, we want it to do something like this. I think there’s there’s obviously a capital issue. You have to have the capital to do it. There’s a technology problem that that needs to happen. There’s also operational changes that needs to happen. And traditional three PLS. When you think about a traditional three PL model, they’re really set up for having one or two bays, you have a FedEx truck come up once a day. You put the packages in the packages, go to a sortation center, gets sorted and potentially the product even makes its way back closer to that fulfillment center, right? So you have this long lag of going back and forth. And, and when you think about the next day saying they model things need to go out quickly.
Michael (16:33):
They need to really be sorted at that place and be sent directly. And I think that’s the challenge that you know, that, that a lot of retailers have and, and even small businesses have. And, and, you know, Amazon’s obviously mastered this and, and you know, I think that’s, that’s kind of why you don’t see a lot of tra traditional fulfillment centers, whether they have one or two or three locations, I think they are getting better at maybe doing today. My kind of hypothesis those by the time people are, are getting at least good at today at a low rate next day will just be the norm. So, you know, it’s like, how are you thinking ahead of the game versus how do I catch up to, to what the norm was last year?
Charles (17:12):
Well, I think Amazon, sorry, not Amazon Walmart in certain places come out with two hour. I think that’s like, yeah, if they can do that, you’re yeah. You’re at some different level on like, like how people are going to be a bash cause the two hour it’s quite literally it’s going on a store shelf. So someone’s was just getting in a car and driving. It’s like a one-to-one with somebody getting in there, getting off the shelf, getting a car and just driving to your house, putting it on your doorstep and then driving back and getting another one. Like how people are happy with bash. Are we really talking like instead of using carriers, is it just like, you know, Fred is coming in his car and delivering it, is that the next thing happening here? I
Michael (17:50):
Would not be surprised. I definitely think that’s in the works. Right. I think that’s definitely something you will see in the next year. Right. And I think when you look at like you know, you’re right, two hours, I’m so used to that on, on Amazon’s whole food prime, two hour delivery here in the Bay area. But when you look at, you know, like even Walmart, if they’re doing it fast, it’s a lot of their one piece selection. So question is how do you enable any seller that the three piece seller, right? The seller who has their own website, and they’re trying to start their own business to compete with that. You need to utilize a diversified carrier and fulfillment network. That’s the only way you’re ever going to be. The only other option is if your price point is so high and your margins are so good that you’re, you’re comfortable air shipping in most cases, that’s not the, that’s not the case. So you do have to rely on diversified network and carrier network.
Charles (18:40):
Yeah. Because once you start doing that, okay, now you’re going to rip into your margin unless you have something very expensive in life. Right. That’s kind of the, the two-prong. Yes. Yeah. It has to be expensive, like small where a shipping. I think I was air shipping something one time it was a piece of machinery and the, you get the rating. You’re like, this is almost, and it needs to be something across someone purchased it for, I think it was a wedding and it needed to get there. So like, all right, that’s a good pay for. Like it’s like the cost of the product itself. Someone’s even more. And that’s continental us. If you go to Alaska or Hawaii, this, you know, pick a number, pick a large number. What if that looks like? And Oh yeah, yeah. Do you guys do
Michael (19:19):
Yeah. Most, I mean, most of our products that we fulfill and in fast speeds are like, you know, today, or, sorry, they’re like $25, you know, $30. So they’re not, you know, your basic items. Yeah.
Charles (19:31):
How about for a more expensive item? Does that kind of matter? Cause then you’d have to buy more of them is kind of the challenge. And you know, now like the, to spread this, to spread this number of items are on the country. You theoretically need a lot of them. Right. So you can’t just start going with a, you know, a thousand units. Like it wouldn’t even, it wouldn’t be enough to go to each warehouse or whatever.
Michael (19:51):
No, I mean a thousand units would be enough. Our, our minimum is, you know, our minimum. We actually don’t really even have a minimum. We just warn you that, Hey, for sending in one item, one unit, you’re not going to get covered. So, so we don’t even have a minimum. People have tested us out with 10 units really. So just test. Okay. And I, I don’t recommend that necessarily, but you know, if people want to test it, they could you know, because you kind of go through the process of setting up, you might as well give it a fair shot of like at least a month’s worth of inventory. But yeah, people have tested it out and you don’t need a whole lot. We’re once again, we’re taking a month’s worth and we’re splitting it. So you don’t have to think, you know, a lot of times people will say, well, if I, if you’re giving it in 10 warehouses, I have to send 10 times the amount. That’s actually a false belief, right? You don’t have to send 10 times and now you send the same amount and we split it and you actually sell the same amount across all those FCS at the same time, because we’re splitting it based on buyer behavior. Is there,
Charles (20:48):
What happens if it goes out of stock a lot faster at warehouse B than a like, is there something that kind of, do retailers have a, want to move it from BTA or do they just send more in and then it just gets reallocated.
Michael (21:00):
So we we’ve typically been pretty good at allocating. And a lot of people utilize our, our cross crosstalks which actually even if they replenish, we’ll probably look, you know, load balance it in the next FC. If that happens, once again, we know that fast delivery speeds increase sales. So we never want a situation where that happens, where we just completely incorrectly estimate and we don’t send enough to this area. So we’re, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep that area full warn you of any replenishment. And then the future replenishment, make sure we even heavier load one FC or one area that we think your product could do better. And so we’re pretty good at this. We’re not perfect. You know, it’s possible that a product with no history to get sent in and we predict, Hey, there’s going to be this much based on this population size, what we know about the skew. And maybe it doesn’t happen that way. And maybe we lose coverage a little bit earlier. But it’s rarely something where it’s so split. I haven’t seen a situation like that where all of a sudden, it’s just one area. It goes out immediately and they have enough to satisfy two, three months at a, you know, everywhere else. It’s that really?
Charles (22:12):
Okay. So I saw this happen actually. One of my sites, this is years back I was selling generators like guests, like, yeah, right. That’s the exact scenario. We have a bunch of generators, but like some state got hit with floods. I forget what it was. And they sell out a hundred percent of generators in one day and it’s just the end. And every other state is just like, has too many, you know, there’s nothing going on there. So you see like the situations like that, where it does make sense to move it or do you just leave it there and try to yeah.
Michael (22:40):
Well, I mean, the thing is, yeah. I mean, that’s a great point. You bring up a great example. I mean, in that situation, we likely wouldn’t move, but people would still be able to order standard. So, you know, it’s like I can’t get it today or next day, but I can still order it standard and we’ll ship it from there. Okay. So, so it’s not like it’s completely out of date.
Charles (23:01):
Okay. So the shipping just slows down to those places at that point? Correct. Got it. Okay. Huh. Very cool. What are the kinds of ways have you seen, have you seen retailers be able to do anything like this, a mini version on their own or do they really need to go with a network?
Michael (23:15):
So we’re going to have some larger retailers right now that, you know, typically we’re in shopping malls and are looking to do something like this. And you know, those are some exciting opportunities there. I think there are retailers that are slightly ahead of the curve. There’s definitely some that aren’t I think, you know, you get to a point where it’s, Hey, do we make this massive investment? Because even if you look at where S C’s are for retailers, a lot of their warehouses are not even in areas that are better for e-commerce they’re in areas that are for retail stores. And so, you know, and that comes down to even a zip code level, right? Like where is your warehouse relative to this zip code in Dallas? Or is it in the right zip?
Charles (23:55):
It’s where it’s better for warehouses where it’s better for trucks to come in and like close to the airport. Like they usually send it around, not what people live, but we’ll warehouses live, which is the weird part. It’s yeah. When you go to these disrupts, you go, it’s literally just like a neighborhood of where only the warehouses live there. And there’s no actual humans at night and it’s just a ghost town and then trucks come in in the morning. It’s a very strange, and that’s where the warehouse kind of clustered together typically.
Michael (24:19):
Yeah, you’re right. They are there, there’s a lot of clusters. And so, you know, they have to analyze, Hey, we’ve had these warehouses for our own self for decades. How do we reposition them? Do we sell them? Do we buy more? Like, it’s a massive capital investment when you’re a large retail, even when you’re a small small retailer. So, you know, I think there’s there’s a lot of want to do it. There’s a lot of want to kind of utilize even somewhat like a software, like kind of how we’re doing, but it’s, it’s not just software. I think of our S our product as infrastructure, as a service, because you’re really utilizing both the technology and the data, but also the operational accountability. It’s like, if Uber didn’t have any accountability around the drivers, I mean, what do you have? You have a wild, wild West where, who cares if a drivers, one star consistently, right. It’s pandemonium. Right. And then people lose trust in that. So I think it’s really important that you also operationally are working with these warehouses every hour, every day, because it is a newer model, right. People are like, well, I don’t own it. How is that going to work? Right. I’m so used to owning that whole thing end to end. And, and you know, so you have to make that decision on your business. Is that something you’re willing to take a look at?
Charles (25:32):
Yeah. I think it’s one of those things where you have started out like Walmart, knowing this video is where there’s going to be a hurricane and there’s gonna be a you know, a blizzard in Boston and they know move all like bread because people like to buy bread before her, like, just like strange things like that. So they’ve been analyzing this for 20 years. They’ve had the software and their own in the machine and it’s just finally getting, and they can do it right because of their scale. But it’s just starting to get more accessible to actual average retailers where now they can understand, Oh, let’s move, let’s have different distribution centers. Let’s kind of move products around. So it was always been there. It’s just been in the hands of only the field at this point up until recently. Yeah.
Michael (26:09):
And one challenge I’ve seen with like traditional retailers, even with the diversified model, they’re still typically set on one national carrier agreement, maybe two. And that’s going to always, you know, to an extent we’ll slow it down. You think about carriers that have had issues. All of a sudden it affects everything. Right. So imagine, you know, you want to sell today leading up to Christmas and you know, the Christmas holiday, like an, a carrier, the one carrier you have a contract with is backlog, and there’s no guarantees, SLS are suspended. How do you, you know, you just lose out on a week or two of sales that people would have ordered your product. Had they known it would have gotten there faster prior to the holiday. And so it’s risky utilizing just one carrier to care.
Charles (26:51):
On the flip side though, do you have an issue where, okay, if I’m shipping a hundred percent through ups, I’m going to go and negotiate some great rates with them. And they’re going to give me a, some deep discount, is that if you’re splitting it up, what happens there because now you don’t have the same bargaining power with any one individual carrier.
Michael (27:10):
Well, actually you do, right? Because if you have more, you have more bargaining power. So it actually is quite the opposite. If you’re working with one, you’re only have the, you know, you, they know, Hey, I’m only working with you and naturally you’ll go with the best one. But when you have rates that are kind of the same across the board, and you’re analyzing, Hey, from going from this neighborhood to this neighborhood, we know we can use this carrier. You’re going to use less of that, you know, specific carrier that you were using prior and use someone else. And so it actually creates a little bit of more of a healthy competition. Okay.
Charles (27:39):
Okay. So then you’re going to them and saying, Hey, we have like this much volume in your area specific, like maybe it’s not national, it’s a regional. And you’re saying in whatever areas, we have this much volume and we, if you can give us a better price, we could run this volume through you instead of running it through ups.
Michael (27:57):
Yeah. I mean, I don’t think there’s, there’s like a conversation they’re going. I mean, it’s just, we’re gonna utilize what the best rate is, you know? And I think having the ability to use different carriers allows us to price shop. And I think the freedom is on the consumer. Just like any consumer who can go price shop right now online to figure out how do I want to ship a package? What’s the cheapest way right now, if they have no contract now, you know, granted we have agreements with carriers, but I think it’s more just, Hey, what is the lowest rate we can get? From this end to this end. And, and granted, I think our rates are pretty phenomenal because we, we provide a fixed cost. That includes not only the shipping label, but also the pick, the pack, everything. So when people see our rates on our site, they literally just paste in the weights and dimensions. Then it says, here’s how much you would pay. I’m all in. There’s no other costs other than storage, because that’s a variable, depending on what long product sits in our network. But people are used to paying only two costs when they’re, when they’re using it.
Charles (28:53):
Yeah. And everyone shows his stories. So that’s kind of, that’s building the model, right? Yeah. okay, cool. This is super interesting. I think people should I think most people have heard of deliver this point, but if they haven’t definitely should check it out. So I’ll thanks for the helpful if folks kind of want to see more about you guys, other than deliver, where else can, where else can we link dough?
Michael (29:14):
Yeah, we, we try to make it as easy as possible to use. You can go on our site, you can check rates type in your product, type in the weights and dims or copy of the product on Amazon. You can talk to our live chat. They’re open Monday through Friday. You could even set up a meeting on our homepage. It says, let’s chat and you can book a time with anyone. You can add me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to talk and redirect you in an area you need to go. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible. We’ve had people who sign up for deliver, self-serve send in product and a week or two start getting it received and start selling on various channels, whether that’s Shopify, big commerce you know, Walmart, you name it. And so it’s a pretty quick, easy setup. We don’t, we don’t have any agreements we’re trying to just do away with the traditional kind of a longer term con commitment that you need to do. Put the onus on us, let us prove ourselves. And, and we think people will be pretty satisfied.
Charles (30:04):
Very cool. All right. I love it. I will definitely link to it in the show notes and appreciate you coming on. Thanks a lot for that. I appreciate you
Michael (30:10):
For having me. Thank you so much. It’s been great.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
