“Let us take care of your shipping”. That’s what ShipSaving proposes. With discounts for USPS & DHL Express and free software, the company started before the pandemic and had to face a complete revolution in e-commerce.
In this special interview for
Website Planet we talked with Grace Yu, Business Development Manager of ShipSaving, to know how they navigated this last couple of years and what are the plans for the future.
The origin of the company was a visit of your founder to a warehouse in 2018. Can you share with us more details about what struck you to start this business and what solutions did you bring to the table?
Our co-founder has been in the e-commerce field before founding ShipSaving. Building a brand new business from zero is difficult, especially for a first-generation immigrant. Fortunately, the United States has an excellent entrepreneurial environment and an e-commerce market.
Our co-founder slowly built up the team in the early entrepreneurship stage and rented a warehouse. We started experiencing some hardships when managing orders and the daily routine of the warehouse:
The stocktaking and inventory needed to be inspected daily. We rely on Excel to manage all the inventory data, which obviously could cause manual data entry errors. The label-generating process at that time was relatively complicated, and almost all the shipping tool platforms that were marketed at that time did not support multi-language.
There were only a few shipping solutions for small e-commerce. In contrast, most solutions are only designed for enterprise-level e-commerce, which is more expensive and complicated to learn.
In the days of doing e-commerce, we have met many competitors or partners in the same field facing the same difficulties as we do. Our goal in the early days of our business was to design a convenient, innovative, and multi-language supporting platform that can help small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses achieve efficient warehouse management and a smooth label-generating process.
You can help e-commerce owners with big discounts on DHL and USPS deliveries. How do you do that?
We are very fortunate to be one of the USPS and DHL certified vendors. The trust is earned by years of our industry accumulation and continuous collaborations with the carriers. In the future, we will actively seek opportunities with other carriers to provide our customers with more comprehensive shipping rates and certified carrier features.
Why is the plan ShipSaving for Starter a good choice for potential customers?
At the beginning of developing ShipSaving, our purpose was to improve order processing efficiency and reduce the cost and time for e-commerce businesses. Nevertheless, with our penetration into the market, we have received voices from customers with different needs. The one that caught most of our attention is the need for a simplified and minimal instruction-required platform for purchasing shipping labels.
On that account, we designed and launched our starter version around the end of 2022, which sole purpose is to offer effortless label generation and real-time tracking management. It is a significant milestone that we achieved.
What are the major challenges and problems that your company has had to surpass since its start?
We’ve been looking for a “sweet spot”. The early stage of entrepreneurship was the most challenging for us. At that time, we had no publicity or reputation in this field. There was a lot to learn in seeking partnerships from carriers, channels, and e-commerce platforms. Each customer we acquired was by us knocking door to door, warehouse to warehouse, in person. While visiting those customers, we also achieved much valuable experience about how to approach the customers and understand what the customers are seeking from us.
These experiences and suggestions helped us improve our features on the platform along the way and accumulate a group of loyal customers. We are always open to customers’ demands and suggestions to bring perfection to our platform. This is how we make it work. This is how we achieve to provide the most popular, user-friendly, comprehensive and efficient shipping solution software for our valuable customers.
With COVID-19, the logistics suffered all over the world. Was your operation affected in that period?
Yes, of course. The pandemic has tremendously changed the way U.S. consumers shop. Three-quarters of U.S. consumers have changed from shopping in retail stores to online shopping. In addition, during the pandemic, more sellers transformed into operating online stores to save the cost of setting up retail stores, and some others began to set up their own e-commerce businesses, which indirectly increased the number of our customers. During the pandemic, we maintained a good amount of customers and a business growth rate.
What are ShipSaving’s plans for the next 3-5 years?
We will continue to provide quality service to our customers. The upcoming stages that we will focus on are integrations with new e-commerce platforms and EPR Solutions, adding a variety of regional and international carriers, and presenting an updated and enhanced operating system.
Since customers are shown huge demands for cross-border shipping solutions, ShipSaving is expanding our business towards international regions. Please look forward to the news in the upcoming future.
