Improve Subscription Delivery Accuracy while Maximizing Shipping Spend Reduction with Kibo and Shipium

Businesses are increasingly adopting subscription models to ensure consistent revenue and foster customer loyalty. However, managing these subscriptions effectively presents challenges, particularly in synchronizing order management with precise shipping schedules to meet customer expectations. This blog post explores how integrating Kibo Commerce's subscription management capabilities with Shipium's subscription shipment timing solutions can address these challenges, offering a seamless experience for both businesses and their customers.

Synchronizing Subscription Management and Shipping is Challenging

E-commerce businesses face several challenges in managing subscriptions effectively:

• Complex Subscription Coordination: Aligning various subscription schedules with inventory and fulfillment processes can be intricate, leading to potential delays or errors.
  
  
• Shipping Optimization: Determining the optimal shipping times to ensure timely deliveries without incurring excessive costs requires precise planning and execution.
  
  
• Customer Satisfaction: Failure to deliver products on the promised dates can result in customer dissatisfaction, increased churn rates, and negative brand perception.

Integrating Kibo Commerce and Shipium APIs to Keep Schedules In Sync

By combining Kibo Commerce's robust subscription management system with Shipium's advanced shipment timing capabilities, businesses can overcome these challenges:

• Unified Subscription Management by Kibo: The composable commerce platform provides an end-to-end workflow that seamlessly integrates with existing e-commerce infrastructures, simplifying the management of subscription lifecycles and enhancing customer retention.
• Optimized Shipment Timing and Planning by Shipium: Shipium's Subscription Timing API enables businesses to calculate precise shipping schedules, ensuring deliveries arrive on the exact dates promised to customers, all while minimizing shipping costs.

How Kibo Commerce Enhances Subscription Management

Kibo Commerce offers a comprehensive subscription management solution designed to streamline operations and boost revenue:

• Seamless Integration: Kibo's platform integrates effortlessly with various shopping carts and tech stacks, allowing businesses to manage subscriptions without overhauling their existing systems.
• Enhanced Customer Service: The platform empowers call centers to track orders, modify subscriptions, swap products, and update customer information, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
• Simplified Checkout: Kibo enables mixed carts of subscription and one-time purchases, reducing cart abandonment rates and increasing average order values.

These features collectively contribute to significant improvements in key performance metrics, including average order value, order volume, and conversion rates.

How Shipium Optimizes Subscription Shipping

Shipium focuses on refining the logistics of subscription deliveries to ensure efficiency and cost-effectiveness:

• Precise Delivery Scheduling: Shipium's Subscription Timing API calculates the optimal shipping dates needed to meet specific delivery targets, working backward from the desired delivery date to plan shipment execution.
• Cost-Effective Shipping: By determining the most economical shipping methods that still meet delivery deadlines, Shipium helps businesses reduce logistics costs without compromising service quality.
• Improved Reliability: The platform enhances the reliability of the shipping process, reducing delays and ensuring that customers receive their subscriptions as expected.

The unique approach Shipium takes to solving this problem comes from the Shipium Intelligence layer. The platform uses data to power several dozen Machine Learning models from speed, to cost, to accuracy, to carbon, and more.

In this instance, Shipium’s Subscription Timing API is leveraging the Dynamic Time-in-Transit model to estimate probable future delivery times for all eligible carrier service methods, then using the Fully Loaded Costing model to understand probable future costs of each service method. The calculations from those two modes are mashed up in a decision matrix to come away with a resulting recommendation.

The Benefits of Kibo and Shipium's Collaboration

Combined, the workflow that customers use to leverage both platforms is as easy to set up as it is powerful to use.

1. As a subscription order is set up in your Kibo environment, Kibo makes a call to Shipium’s API with the following:
   • Desired delivery date
   • Delivery information (destination address, package level detail, dimweights, etc.)
   • Origin information (already set up in Shipium)
2. Shipium’s API looks at your shipping contracts set up at that origin and works back from the desired delivery date to identify the best date to generate the shipment in order to hit the date with the cheapest possible shipping method.
3. Bonus: Customers pair this API with Shipium’s Fulfillment Engine APIs to do a network-wide assessment if multiple origins can be in scope, meaning identify the best origin to ship from that will hit the desired delivery date at the cheapest price.
4. Shipium returns back the recommended date to execute the shipment.

The integration of Kibo Commerce and Shipium provides a holistic solution to subscription management and delivery:

• Enhanced Customer Experience: Timely and reliable deliveries, coupled with flexible subscription options, lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Operational Efficiency: Automating and synchronizing subscription management with shipping schedules reduces manual interventions, minimizing errors and streamlining operations.
• Scalability: The combined solution supports business growth by efficiently managing increasing subscription volumes and expanding customer bases.

The partnership between Kibo Commerce and Shipium addresses the critical challenges of subscription management and shipping in the e-commerce sector. By leveraging their integrated solutions, businesses can enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and, most importantly, deliver exceptional experiences to their subscribers.