Company announcements, insights, and stories
Millions of packages get delivered through Shipium's platform, and customers rely on our credibility, steadiness, and growth to support them. Our company blog shares stories along the way since our founding in 2019.
5 Benefits of Effective Carrier Contract Management
Expenses, service inconsistencies, and compliance risks can quickly erode ecommerce shipping operators’ profit margins and customer satisfaction. Without sufficient oversight of how your mix of carriers operates, your business can miss out on potential cost-saving opportunities, not to mention open itself up to potential legal liabilities.
An Overview of Shipium’s ML-Powered Time-in-Transit Modeling
With the bar for digital customer experience now higher than ever, retailers are increasingly focused on creating a competitive edge through faster, more transparent, lower-cost shipping. But without the right understanding of transit performance, it’s impossible to actually make promises you know you can keep — which leaves many shippers in the position of having to decide between optimizing for customer experience at the expense of margins, or vice-versa.
How Last Mile Delivery Impacts Your Shipping Cost
When studying ecommerce leaders like Amazon, it becomes clear that focusing on the customer journey is the path to scaling growth. Last mile delivery is the stage of your supply chain that puts your product directly into the hands of your customers. Getting it right can significantly impact customer experience, driving increased sales. How can optimizing your final mile logistics elevate the overall customer experience, and how does that impact your bottom line? Let’s explore its importance and the cost-saving benefits a well-optimized process can offer to your business and customers.
How to Avoid a Split Shipment
Attempting to avoid a split shipment for multi-SKU orders has become a white whale for many ecommerce shippers — and with good reason. Splitting too many multi-SKU shipments can have one of the most significant negative impacts on your business's margins. Let’s explore the top strategies to minimize single orders becoming multi-piece shipments upstream in your ecommerce supply chain and ways to manage costs downstream if splitting an order is unavoidable.
7 Key Steps to Efficient Parcel Spend Management
Ecommerce parcel cost represents a large portion of the expenses that chip away at your profits. With rising carrier rates and evolving customer demands, optimizing spending has become vital to remaining competitive. Let’s explore seven steps you can take to implement more effective parcel spend management for your business.
Parcel Forum 2024 - Actionable AI Presentation (Video Recording)
Parcel Forum 2024 was a great experience. The community has a positive outlook on the future and is eager for genuinely good ideas that will change their businesses.
So Much Growth: Recapping an Incredible 2024 Heading into Peak Season
Shipium saw so much incredible evolution over the last several months that sometimes it's tough to stop, take a breath, and observe the changes.
Shipium Named to Will Reed’s Top 100 Class of 2024
Really excited to share that for the second time, Shipium has been named to the Will Reed's Top 100 list.
10 Shopify Fulfillment Best Practices for Ecommerce Businesses
A successful Shopify ecommerce business not only drives sales but also delivers a seamless fulfillment experience. Efficiently managing products throughout the supply chain is critical to meeting evolving customer expectations. Let’s unpack ten best practices for Shopify fulfillment that your ecommerce business needs to know.
Complete Ecommerce Supply Chain Guide
Complete Ecommerce Supply Chain Guide In this guide you’re going to learn how to structure a modern ecommerce supply chain with a focus on the customer. We wrote it in digestible chunks making it easy to see how it all connects. Textbooks are for MBA courses and five-paragraph blog posts aren’t useful. Instead, we thread the needle with comprehensive yet condensed insight you won’t want to miss.
Closed-Loop Parcel: The Future of Shipping
The world of parcel shipping has changed dramatically in recent years. Network complexity and customer expectations are both higher than ever. Amazon Prime has raised the bar for performance across the board, to the point that today’s customers now expect fast, low-cost, transparent shipping options. In fact, this has become such a deeply ingrained preference that shipping is now the 2nd-greatest driver of ecommerce growth, behind only price.
Shipium Recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Market Guide™
This week Gartner just released their 2024 Market Guide for Multi-Carrier Parcel Management Solutions. The Market Guide provides an overview of market trends and industry vendors. Our platform was recognized with a focus on our product Carrier Selection which handles rate shopping, label management, shipping operations, and several other features covered in the guide.
Ecosystems are the Future of Supply Chain Technology
We returned from three conferences in two weeks with an enthused perspective about the future of supply chain technology.
Shipium Given 2023 UPS Ready Inspire Award
Big news to share: Shipium was recently given the 2023 UPS Ready Inspire Award.
Shipium by the numbers: 2023 recap
Shipium had an incredible year because our customers had an incredible year. We measure our success based on the achievements and happiness of our customers, first and foremost. By that measure, the platform performed better than anyone could have hoped. Now that it’s January 2024, here is a breakdown of some interesting numbers, factoids, and stories about Shipium in 2023.
Nucleus Report: Shipium Cuts Shipping Spend by 10%
Nucleus Research is the leading independent supply chain research firm specializing in ROI analyses. Clients turn to Nucleus to square the value of solutions in the supply chain technology industry.
The network that carriers wish you used
We’re excited to announce the formal release of the Shipium Carrier Network, our ecosystem of pre-integrated carriers and service methods that provides immediate access to core carrier interfaces such as generating labels, manifesting shipments, and getting tracking IDs.
Risk Mitigation (as a Service)
It is about 30 days away until UPS workers probably go on strike. Negotiations have been on-again-off-again, and there is a chance it will be resolved by then, but with the latest being 97% of union workers approving the strike, it's reasonable for companies to plan as if it will happen.
Shipium Named in Built In's 2023 Best Places to Work List
Built In’s esteemed Best Places to Work Awards, now in its fifth year, honor companies across numerous categories. The program honors companies – remote, hybrid and in-office – with the best total rewards packages across the U.S. and in the following tech hubs: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Colorado, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington DC.
40 Ecommerce Supply Chain Analytics [Updated for 2023]
Today you are going to learn which analytics and metrics matter for ecommerce supply chains. This resource is different from anything else you’ll find because our goal is to list and talk through lots of examples. Few resources out there extend beyond a bland definition of analytics. The guide will be especially interesting to ecommerce professionals because the list is sourced from veterans of Amazon and Zulily, pulling from their experience of measuring the things that mattered.
3 strategies retailers can deploy to be recession proof
Shipium CEO Jason Murray spoke with the team at Supply Chain Brain during NRF 360 to talk about a subject that's on every retail and ecommerce leaders mind at the moment, how retail can survive during an economic downturn.
How to Thrive During Economic Downturn: Amazon's Playbook
The downturn is real and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Fast, Free & On-Time Delivery (For Less) Helps Retail Win
Customers don’t care about your single carrier relationship or superior rate negotiation skills, they want their items fast, free, and on-time. It’s your job as a modern operator to put their needs and desires first and use the best carrier for the job, not just the one you are locked into. I learned the value of this lesson in the early 2000’s when helping Amazon switch from solo dependency on UPS to utilizing a multi-carrier mix to drive shipping speed and cost improvements.
10 Retail Data Points that Show the Value of Fast Shipping
We’re constantly pouring over the latest data and research within the retail, e-commerce and logistics industries, looking for great nuggets and interesting trends. Much of the research that caught our eye between 2019-2022 focused in on how to help retailers maximize the efficiency of online shopping, by curbing cart abandonment. When digging into this information, there's a clear correlation between how often online shoppers abandon items before purchase, and their desire to receive free or fast shipping. For retailers making the shipping experience a key part of the shopping experience is a simple and effective way to boost online purchases. Here are ten key stats that reinforce this idea.
Podcast: Operations Is the Other Half of the Ecommerce Brain
When Amazon launched their Buy With Prime offering late April 2022, our friends at FutureCommerce asked me to hop on the podcast to share what Shipium thought of the announcement. With the industry focused on the one-click-checkout war, I proposed a different take: This was a very big deal to tech-forward 3PLs who compete against Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA).
How Retailers Can Win Back Leverage in the Great Carrier War
Consider a three-sided relationship between retailers, carriers, and technology providers.
Shipium Makes Logistics Series a History Raising $27.5M
Today we are announcing some historical news. Our latest funding round, a $27.5M Series A led by Insight Partners, is the largest venture-backed Series A in logistics SaaS history.
Supply Chain Technology and Retail Technology are Merging
The NRF Big Show in NYC was an interesting experience. While attendance was obviously down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the spirit was still there, and intelligence could still be gathered. In particular, buzz around sessions, speakers, and overall floor conversations can tell you a lot about where the industry of Retail Technology is going.
AI in Supply Chain: Shipium at TransformX Panel
On October 7th, CEO Jason Murray got a chance to speak on a panel discussion at the annual TransformX event put on my ScaleAI.
Freight Waves TV Interview: Simplifying Logistics
Last week I had a chance to sit down with Andrew Cox from FreightWaves TV to chat about Amazon's early days and what learnings from that period can be applied today for everyone else who isn't Amazon.
Supporting the Women In Retail (WIR) June Virtual Exchange
We are big fans of the community building efforts by Diane, Kristina, and the rest of the Women In Retail organization, which is why we were excited by the opportunity to support them by sponsoring their June Virtual Exchange.
Shipium Raises $8 Million in Seed Funding
Shipium is proving to be an idea that ecommerce companies want. Due to the explosion of ecommerce over the last year, it's proving to be an idea they need, too.
Pull vs. Push: How Amazon Revolutionized Its Supply Chain
Ecommerce operators have a bad habit of falling into "supply-side" thinking. Forecasting demand has been figured out by someone else, they think, with merchandise ordered and ready to be placed into fulfillment centers. Their job then becomes a linear planning exercise going from start to finish in increasingly smaller units. The merchandise goes from container to truck to pallet to box to door step. This is push-based thinking. It's the idea that the job is efficiently and effectively pushing the flow of goods from beginning to end. One of the most powerful ideas both Amazon and Zulily adopted was the idea of pull-based supply chain thinking. Start from the end goal, and work backwards. Efficient and effective planning in reverse order is where actual stepwise optimizations can be found.
Constrain on speed, optimize for cost
Ecommerce fulfillment is ultimately a collection of decisions being made. Some are made simultaneously while others are made sequentially. Almost all are logical decisions. If you want to improve your ecommerce fulfillment process, you need to make better decisions. But what constitutes a "better" decision?
Talking the Magic of Logistics on Future Commerce Podcast
Sometimes it seems like the behemoths of Amazon and Walmart are using black magic to promote free and fast shipping. But it's not magic. It's mostly sophisticated software combined with learned principles.
How Ecommerce Profitably Scales in 2020 and Beyond
Over the last 12 months, we've had the chance to speak with hundreds of smart people working hard in the ecommerce industry (514, to be exact). We spoke to industry veterans like Arthur Valdez, Jr. Target's Chief Supply Chain Officer and jammed with founders of rising DTC brands who are thinking about fulfillment in a modern way like Woody Hambrecht of Haus. The full spectrum, each as engaging and hard working as the other. Patterns emerged that we could see with increasing clarity. I want to share these observations with you.
Want a Path to Profitability? Focus on Your Supply Chain
DTC and ecommerce companies can dramatically improve their businesses by understanding how their supply chains impact customer experiences in a way that determines winners and losers.
4 Cost Savings Tips for Ecommerce Supply Chains
The continual reduction of costs in the supply chain is a top priority for supply chain managers. The trick is think of it less as a cost cutting exercise and more as a strategic job: the funds being saved should propel differentiation, like free shipping or loyalty programs, which in turn open up new cost cutting opportunities.
Study shows consumer preferences amid pandemic [2020 Survey]
A little over a week ago we ran a study in conjunction with SurveyMonkey across US residents to understand how the pandemic has impacted online shopping behavior.
Top 6 Principles of a Modern Supply Chain
While not the primary concern relative to the health and safety of family and colleagues, one perspective all professionals should take soon is an evaluation of how to adjust to future realities. The world will return to normal at some point soon and we will all get back to thinking about our customers, partners and businesses. Major moments of uncertainty and volatility are often the best of times to think about your business and develop plans for when normalcy returns. Focus on stepwise improvements while the going is tough, so when things turn around, the tough can get going stronger than before.
Delivery Experience Will Determine Future Winners
Traditional ecommerce customer experience priorities, like browsing products or talking to customer service, don’t include the idea of delivery experience. The notion of delivery being a part of the buying experience was conceptual but never real because it was hard to measure, which meant it was hard to improve, which meant it was hard to market to customers. So why care about it?
