An innovative online retailer built a thriving business creating a marketplace with daily and weekly product deals across a wide range of categories, including fashion goods, electronics, home goods, health & beauty, kids and pets.

A secondary problem was onboarding new suppliers, products and deals – a process that was equally manual.

Merchandisers and buyers spent too much time shepherding supplier and product information with spreadsheets being handed off between disparate teams, introducing errors and backlogs.

Retailer Overview

The Bottom Line Suffered

Success hinged on onboarding dozens of new suppliers and thousands of products monthly

The company launched a dropship program to scale the business quickly without having to manage inventory. However, they hadn’t anticipated how manual the program would be to manage.

And chaos soon became the new normal.

The dropship program, proved to be highly manual and consumed nearly 100% of the time of three staff members.

With each new offer launch, ongoing challenges included:

• Order acknowledgement

• Managing returns

• Tracking shipment status

• Keeping pulse on supplier inventory

• Reconciling invoices with shipments and returns

Retail Operations Mayhem

Slow to Launch New Offers

Operations couldn’t support the business:

• Customers could not find out order status

• Returns management was painful for all

• Buyers were consumed by spreadsheets and could not buy

• The buyer team was over 40% behind in bringing new deals to market

Online Retailer Doubles New Product Offerings

in 3 Months

CASE STUDY

The company’s staff was spending all their time on the clerical tasks of data entry and detail chasing, instead of the higher impact work of sourcing new vendors and products – the company’s true source of differentiation.

Merchantry’s SaaS dropship management and product information management solution addressed the company’s core dropship challenges and their secondary supplier catalog onboarding and self-service PIM challenges.

End-to-end, “out of the box” dropship management, PIM and supplier onboarding

Automated order management

Satisfied customers and employees

“Self Service PIM” with suppliers onboarding their own product catalogues

Low total cost of ownership (TCO)

Low upront expenses

Fast “time to impact” with rapid implementation and adoption

No hardware to manage

Merchantry’s dropship management solution created a smooth fulfillment process that kept all buyers, suppliers and customers informed throughout. Covering order transmission, fulfillment and tracking, returns management and reconciling payments, the solution turned a cumbersome manual process into a fast and scalable area of excellence for the retailer.

Existing suppliers transitioned to “self-service product information management”, giving them control to ensure their information was correct and up to date. New suppliers enjoyed a logical, repeatable onboarding process for their offers and deals.

Merchantry’s cloud-based solution enables a pricing model based on usage based with minimal upfront implementation expenses. The solution was designed specifically for retailer needs and requires no custom programming and limited implementation support, resulting in a low total cost of ownership (TCO).

Cloud Based Dropship Management – Supplier Catalog Onboarding – PIM solution

The SolutionA New Sense of Order

Dropship Management – Order from Chaos

PIM – Empowering Suppliers

Software as a Service (SaaS) – Low TCO

CASE STUDY

Cloud-based Dropship Management and PIM Solution Automates Chaotic Manual Processes

The Merchantry drop shipping and PIM solution was up and running within a month, allowing the company to start realizing a return on their investment quickly. Within 3 months, they had onboarded nearly 200 supplier catalogs, on their way to managing over 700 suppliers and 28,000 products today.

• 1 month from contract to supplier onboarding

• Within 3 months onboarded nearly 200 supplier catalogs

• Nearly doubled number of new deals per month – from 3,500 to 6,000

• Adding 80 new suppliers every month

• One-third less time spent on dropship order management and supplier onboarding

Offering customers smoother, better informed and more accurate service, with the right items delivered quickly, enhanced the company’s reputation—a word-of-mouth benefit that is particularly valuable for an online retailer.

Just as important was the impact the solution has had on supplier relationships. Better processes and connected systems eliminated headaches, errors and bottlenecks making the company easy to do business with.

Eliminating time-consuming processes and errors cut the onboarding effort by a third and freed staff to focus on growing the supplier base and improving customer service. Cost saving is one thing, but scalable growth is even more important. The company is continuously adding 80 suppliers and 3,500 products per month. And the company has nearly doubled the number of deals they can launch in a month, from 3,500 prior to Merchantry to over 6,000 new deals and products per month today.

Retailer Results

Higher Customer Satisfaction

Improved Supplier Relationships

Dramatic Productivity Gains

CASE STUDY

Retailer Generates Results Within One Month of Contract Signature

Success by the numbers