How Reshoevn8r leveraged Fulfil to give their customers an Amazon-like delivery experience with a 3PL

Brent’s first priority when joining the Reshoevn8r team was twofold: find a new 3PL, and find a new ERP. Ideally, the goal was to have one that worked well with the other. However, that’s easier said than done - most ERPs don’t have the ability to easily integrate with a merchants’ 3PLs, which was the exact situation Brent found himself in. He had systems that had been in place since the company’s founding, and weren’t able to communicate with the rest of Reshoevn8r’s software stack and fulfillment partners. 

Furthermore, in the Amazon-era of ecommerce, he was faced with increasingly demanding expectations from their customers.

“Amazon changed people’s perspective and expectations on how long it would take to deliver something bought online, and how much it would cost, and we needed a system to help us compete with that.” 

This was amplified by the fact that Reshoevn8r was committed to offering free shipping to their customers, but didn’t have the option to rate-shop among different shipping carriers. 

Additionally, without an integration between their order management software system and their 3PL, they were at the mercy of their 3PLs inventory management reports, without any level of control or the ability to verify inventory adjustments. As a result of this, the purchasing team was often forced to make knee jerk reactions based on unexpected large inventory adjustments that made it look like they were suddenly going to be running out of stock. To make matters worse, a large percentage of Reshoevn8r’s orders are bundled products, which exacerbated their problems with inventory management, as it wasn’t possible for them to track the input products accurately. 

Outside of Shopify, Reshoevn8r also sells their product on several marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. However, their order management platform was only intaking Shopify Orders, which meant that all marketplace orders needed to be tracked externally from the system, without a centralized pool of inventory. This made everyone’s life more difficult - from the customer support team needing to look in multiple places to find an order, to the purchasing team being forced to manually extract data in order to get a true understanding of their sales velocity. Furthermore, there was truly no centralized system of truth where the team could get a bird’s eye view of their business at a glance - even something as simple as a monthly sales by channel report was a laborious, manual process.

One of the core benefits of Fulfil’s platform is the 100% open API, which means that virtually any field, button, or data that you see in the UI, you can access programmatically via the API. This enables deep, native integrations to a variety of different systems and partners in the ecommerce ecosystem, including 3PLs, without the need for expensive 3rd party middleware.

Fulfil was able to work with Reshoevn8r to natively integrate to a new 3PL partner using Fulfil’s API, which solved a variety of the original challenges that Brent and the Reshoevn8r team were facing. First, Reshoevn8r is now able to fully benefit from rate-shopping among a variety of different carriers, instead of being locked into a single carrier for every order. Because they offer free shipping, this immediately resulted in a drastic reduction in shipping and fulfillment costs. Additionally, Reshoevn8r’s customers now have the ability to select expedited shipping, if they’re willing to pay a little extra for even faster shipping.

Furthermore, this integration played a critical part in centralizing Reshoevn8r’s inventory into a single source of truth, which removed the need to rely on the 3PL’s inventory management system for accurate inventory tracking. This gave the purchasing team the confidence they needed to make more decisive, long term procurement decisions without the worry of having large unexpected inventory adjustments. 

Fulfil is also now the central hub for all channel integrations and order management - no longer does Reshoevn8r need to track inventory separately across different platforms for each channel. Now, they have all of their orders flowing into a single system to understand their sales, channels, and growth rates on a deeper level. 

Finally, Fulfil natively supports bundled products, including Built on the Fly bundles where the sub-components are stored separately in the warehouse, and assembled into a kit only when one is ordered. Not only is this now tracked by default within Fulfil, but also effectively communicates these orders to the 3PL via the integration that was built with the 3PL. This drastically simplifies the management of these SKUs across the company, from forecasting and purchasing, to inventory tracking and fulfillment.