Five years after "Shipageddon," ShipBob CMO Casey Armstrong returns with a different warning
He's shipped over a billion units. He says your Black Friday gets decided in September.
Casey Armstrong, CMO of ShipBob, returns for his third appearance to break down peak season 2026. Five years ago the villain was Shipageddon. This year there's no single boogeyman, just tariffs that pushed brands global, an exploding channel mix, and AI quietly eating the back office.
What you'll learn:
Guest: Casey Armstrong, CMO of ShipBob, the global fulfillment platform with 70+ facilities worldwide. Previously VP of Marketing at BigCommerce.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster • 00:00.001
This episode is brought to you in part by Swym. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swym actually activates that data. When someone wish lists a product, you could trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Klaviyo or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wish lists for gifts, and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in-store. And unlike card abandonment, wishlist data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this. Just not right now. Swym's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes You can try it for free today at getswim. com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M. com slash Kurt. My friends, it is almost that time. It is soon to be Black Friday. And with that comes a whole lot of shipping headaches, right? Fulfillment. And delivery is the name of the game here. We're competing against Amazon and they're, you know, mostly two-day delivery. I've got questions about it. And so I need someone who has shipped many packages. We're joined today by Casey Armstrong, CMO of Ship Bob, in his third appearance on this show, right, to discuss surviving peak 2026 shipping season. Uh, and you know, a lot has changed since in the last five years around shipping costs, etc. And I want to dig deep on this. Casey, welcome to the show. You uh still still kicking at it shit, bob? How long you been doing that?
Casey Armstrong • 01:59.160
Yeah, Kurt, great to see ya. Glad to be back on here. Um And having for me for the third time. So I recently hit the eight year mark over at Chip Bob. So we're twelve years we're we're twelve years in and and I've been here for eight and Uh yeah, it's been it's been an amazing ride. Shipped hundreds of millions of uh of orders, as you mentioned, well over a billion units. So uh yeah, we've we've seen quite a bit.
Kurt Elster • 02:22.780
Billion units. That's I like that number because as a human it is not it really is not possible to conceive of it. Like I cannot visualize a billion. It's just a huge number. What uh so the last time you're here it's five years ago approximately, December 2021. Yeah. Been a long time. Shippagidden was the villain then. Fun word to say, even more difficult to spell. Is what's the villain in 2026? The shipping villain?
Casey Armstrong • 02:51.360
Yeah. In in different words yesterday, because we've we've had just all of these you know, macro curveballs and headwinds. I mean, we don't need to talk about what was happening in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one really, but from I mean, I know you remember well like the the iOS changes and the Apple Facebook war, which I think a lot of people forget about, but that really impacted brands, especially when there was that whole, you know, digitally native um brand phase and D to C is like the only channel push and then of course there's been uh tariffs And de minimis changes last year, which was so impactful. Um, obviously there's the war going on, which is a very serious thing, but I don't think it's really impacting brands anywhere close to what it has in the past. And so part of me wonders like, is there even a boogeyman this year or or like an enemy for people to really like rally the troops and go against? I think there's actually, obviously there's something that's taken the world by storm, and that's that's artificial intelligence and AI. I think that can be a massive benefit for a lot of brands. I think a lot of Founders and individuals are balancing the the costs of AI and not just like from a monetary perspective, but also uh just from like a a mind space and like a time perspective is like What is what is adding value versus what is noise? We've seen just some amazing use cases in AI and have invested heavily there, not just in the way we execute and run our business, but in the things that we've rolled out, which I'm sure we'll get to soon. But overall, I think unlike other years, there isn't like a clear boogeyman. It's it's more just keeping the team you know, focused. Um, because along with AI, there's also I think been this massive like channel boom or channel proliferation. And so again, it's like how do we keep the team focused on the right things, especially when peak season is here? And then maybe reopen the playbook again, how we go about executing our business and you know starting in early 2027.
Kurt Elster • 04:54.000
What's this uh what's this channel boom?
Casey Armstrong • 04:56.980
So yeah, I'd love your take here actually as well, but it's it seems, you know, really heading up to I don't know twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, uh, you know, and in in quite a few years before that, so many of these these businesses, they were kind of building Their businesses in kind of three different ways. Of course there was some crossover, but it it really seemed like they were three distinct paths. One was you were building it, let's say a Shopify store and using meta-ads. The other path was I sell on Amazon. And the other path was I sell in physical retail. And again, obviously there was some overlap, but we didn't really see a ton. I still remember going to an event. It was like in 2020 2017 or 18. Um I think it was uh oh god, who was running that event? It was one of the like the big um Amazon like ad tech players at the time. Um and I remember talking, I was just talking to so many different brands there and they were Amazon sellers. And I'd asked them about Shopify, I'd ask them about Big Commerce, I'd ask them about the other platforms, and and they just kind of looked at me blankly and and they're like, who? And they were just so focused on Amazon. Uh obviously today that would never happen because the the world shifted a bunch. And so all of these brands now, they're looking at how can they you know, obviously build up their own store and and leverage things like subscription to create create like this very consistent business if it fits their business model. But they're they're looking into Amazon earlier. They're getting approached by retailers earlier and there's a lot of opportunity in retail that just did not exist in years past. And then also what's been exciting is there are a lot of digital channels beyond just selling direct through your website as well. And so obviously TikTok shop has been A huge boost to many brands. And I think some brands are finding the consistency there versus just like the one-off wonders. Whatnot has, for the right brands, has just really increased. We've seen some of our customers do exceptionally well on whatnot. And then there's other channels like like Fair from like a wholesale perspective, which continues to to pick up momentum and has been such a You know, they they've been uh executing so impressively. And so now there's just so many of these different channels. And so again, with peak here, it's like, okay, well, how can we maximize our returns on everything we've done leading up to the year and and the inventory that we have on hand? Uh but you know, not just this year, but next year as well, is how the can they continue to to expand their channel mix?
Kurt Elster • 07:21.800
And okay. Great data to have. You brought up last year. Last year, uh looking at some some shit bob stats, it sounds like international growth really uh took off for you, is what you saw. Is this, you know, are these tariff refugees? Like it You know, was this always going to happen just because e-com is growing in those places or because we're shifting demand?
Casey Armstrong • 07:47.640
I think it's a combination of the tariff. and de minimis impact. And so these brands were looking to they they'd been probably looking around for a while, but I think that was like the tipping point or the the external forcing mechanism for them to take the plunge and go global. Again, whether that's them going from the US up into Canada, whether then that's them jumping across the pond to the UK or the EU, maybe them them going all the way to Australia. uh flipping the switch in in shipping cross border and figuring out you know what what does their admix look like there. And so again, I think it was a lot of brands were were ready for it. And then also I I saw some parallels, I think, in the software as a service or the SaaS space, um, probably, you know, leading up to the the late teens, you know, the late 2010s, where there became so much education in the space. And there'd been people that have been around and done a lot of like the hard things and and discovered like really how to execute that well. And so I think that there's just been a lot of Um, you know, e-commerce was still in such a kind of its infancy in the, you know, call it 2019, 2020 era. People have been you know, just able to to learn a lot about what works and what doesn't work. Solutions like us at Chipab are enabling that. There's a lot of cross border solutions and and people that are helping people figure out how to get things like VAT set up or the compliance needed to sell certain goods globally. And so I think it was just this overall mix of uh just being very opportune for a lot of brands. But yes, I I think the the tariff into minimis changes were were really the forcing mechanism to push a lot of people forward.
Kurt Elster • 09:29.560
Yeah, and we've been in what? Just over a year of since uh De Minimus died.
Casey Armstrong • 09:35.400
I mean, and that was on the global scale. I mean s changes with China were happening even before that. Uh and it was really just I think it was December, not November, but like December of twenty twenty-four. I don't think what year we're in. Twenty twenty four when there was like the MX changes down in Mexico. that really started causing a lot of the rumbling and and changes especially in in the apparel with uh apparel brands because that changed a lot of like the um regulation with textiles and where they were manufactured and what was and wasn't manufactured in in Mexico. Um and so that caused a huge ripple with these, let's call it, de minimis or section three two one brands. Um and then, you know, the tariff started in in Q1 of last year and it's um I'd say fortunately calm down a bit or at least provide some stability. And then there's like the tariff refund impact um for for those that that qualify. Which could be a a a tailwind for a lot of brands, whether they're paying off their debt or can funnel that back back into ads or inventory. Um, but yeah, it's uh that that was definitely a wild ride.
Kurt Elster • 10:39.060
What uh all right, so your data covers thousands of brands here. What's the healthiest category right now? Or like do you have ideas like, well, this category's slowing down, this one's taking off? Can we break it down by vertical?
Casey Armstrong • 10:53.400
Well so we don't have full access to like, you know, their PL and what that looks like. So I don't know if if I'd be the best person to answer that. I I will say The these these brands again were the I I touched up on this slightly earlier, but the brands where uh an element of subscription can be brought into the business to provide the consistency. We've seen some We've we've wor we fortunately work with and and seen some extremely impressive brands that have built these massive businesses that are very capital efficient by taking advantage of subscriptions the right way. And that's another area where again, I think people have learned a lot from from software as a service or SaaS and are layering those elements into e-commerce where a lot of a lot of brands often think of Um, and and I'm sure you guys do with your agencies, you know, you're always thinking of like ROI or how can we be um you know cash flow positive on the on the on the first order. But there's also retention. And so it's interesting to see what a lot of these brands are doing that have subscription to drive retention. Again, whether that's uh including freebies or what are the perks as you continue to stay on. But but those that have really nailed retention and can really crush that LTV, they're they're just seeing, again, they're just building these massive direct to consumer brands um with subscription.
Kurt Elster • 12:24.639
Now, all right, I don't doubt the power of subscription, but the phrase that stood out to me was doing subscription the right way. Do we know off the top of our head the wrong way?
Casey Armstrong • 12:34.780
Um let's see the wrong way. There's a lot of people that will offer we're where we've seen customers struggle there is offering Discounts early if you subscribe and there's no real reason to come back, and it's truly not a subscription business. And so that way people are just getting these discounts waiting to get the initial order. And usually they'll give like an outsize discount for that first subscription order because they are running the LTV math, Lifetime Value, or the LTV math. Uh and then the people churn. Um again, you see this a lot with software as well, but with these with these brands, it's like, okay, well, if I'm getting twenty, thirty, forty percent off for that first order, that's great. I'll just order it and then cancel right away. And then there's also really nothing The the subscription solutions continue to get um, you know, stronger and and handle more complex use cases. I've been very impressed with what Recharge has been able to continue to roll out, and they obviously made a pretty back big acquisition with Skio um earlier this year. But uh, you know, it's a lot of people can skirt around these. If they do actually want to order again in the future, they can and and the brands don't make changes to their first order, they can often skirt around it and get another massive discount as well.
Kurt Elster • 13:56.080
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Casey Armstrong • 15:21.220
Yeah. What what do you see there on the subscription side?
Kurt Elster • 15:24.579
Subscriptions are such a it's a tough sell. I mean fundamentally the the person subscribing realizes this is a now a recurring cost in my life. And their pushback is always going to be like, well, how do I get the timing right? And so I think, you know, a subscription, it is an easy thing to bolt on. It is a difficult thing to do really well. And you could base that on, you know, what what is the take rate on my subscription? And then what is my churn rate and you know a lot of times or how often do they stay in the subscription? You know, and a lot of times it's like by month four they're gone Yeah. So like, well, if they were there for three months, was that worth it on the discount or should I have just sold it to them one time at the full price up front to begin with?
Casey Armstrong • 16:05.839
Yeah. I I think it's I think that's interesting with there's companies like Rise, Rise Coffee. Um, and so coffee is something that people often have this daily habit of, and so it lends them itself well to a subscription business and they've done such a good job of like their funnel, it's really tough to check out without going through the subscription flow. And so that's a risk that they're taking that they will lose some people that that find that friction as a negative, but if they're taking a huge bet on on the quality and stickiness of the product and they are pulling you through that and then thinking of other levers to keep you in, again, that's a way to drive a huge business. And then I think on the other end, there's companies like Mementus, the supplement company, where if you are providing this quality product and people do find themselves just naturally coming back. They did not go through the subscription flow, but they continue to see, oh, I actually can s I'm spending X amount on the products every month or every other month. Um, and I can get this call it 10 to 20% discount if I just do it through the subscription flow. That way they're building up this like brand trust in advance and Um again, I think that's how you get even like the the most long-term customers. But at the end of the day, you st obviously still need to deliver an extremely quality product.
Kurt Elster • 17:23.920
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, it you're always gonna have a hard time with a a crappy product, right? Yeah. It's gonna make life hard. What um is there We've got Black Friday right around the corner. Like October will be here before I know it. Is there anything on from your perspective, from the fulfillment side, from the warehouse side that I should be doing to prepare for Black Friday.
Casey Armstrong • 17:49.300
Yeah, I'd say fortunately here my advice is the same pretty much regardless of what year it is. I mean, this is what we call inbound peak. And so of course we all know peak season or Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you know, is when you make a lot of your your revenue from the sales you make, uh, inventory going outbound. But for us this is inbound peak. And so this starts um and this this bleeds up pretty close all the way to um, you know, to the holiday selling where both for direct to consumer and for for B2B, we see such a massive influx in inventory coming into our network. And so Know that your fulfillment partner, uh, while you might say, Oh, this is not your busy time because your busy time is is the holidays when when a bunch of stuff is shipping outbound. This is when they're maybe even busier because so much inventory is coming inbound and receiving goods is often more complex than I think shipping goods. uh as long as the the your fulfillment partner does it the right way um because you're trying to make sure that the product can product count is correct that the SKUs that were sent in, let's say the color mix is correct. If you are shipping things like supplements or coffee, that the lot tracking or the expiration dates are correct. There's so much that needs to be done from Uh an inbound standpoint for us, we have our inventory placement program. And so we're always like load balancing on behalf of our customers. Um and so that's like a huge way to get ahead of, you know, Black Friday to Cyber Monday because you can um you know, ship faster, ship more expensively, but you can also push out your sales date closer and closer to Christmas um to continue to extend those sales and drive some extra revenue. But I think really, again, you since you asked on the fulfillment side, whatever you can do to set up your partners for success from things like barcoding to just uh clean inbound to just really scheduling and giving them a heads up of what's coming and when, uh, that will really set you up for success. Because the last thing you want to be doing is is scrambling and asking for inventory counts and where inventory is when when it's your time to, you know, really be Going full throttle on marketing.
Kurt Elster • 19:57.800
And you mentioned you mentioned inventory placement, like total number of inventory placement locations. If I have a partner, a 3PL, often I could distribute my inventory across the country. That sounds interesting. Yeah, tell me a little bit about the logic with inventory placement. Like how many locations does a typical brand need to be optimal here?
Casey Armstrong • 20:20.100
Again, that that dep so we have um whenever brands are starting to work with us, we run them through really our our time in transit and inventory placement like algorithms just so that they can see like what should that mix look like because sometimes the um the let's call it node count or the facility count kind of intimidates them a bit, even if we are managing the distribution um on their behalf. And so it's really unique for the different brands. And so that's why they should come through and and run it through to get like an assessment of what's right for their business. And then as they work with us, there's actually in their analytics sections uh from an inventory standpoint in chip hob you can actually start to see what is the optimal mix and you can start toggling if you want to add additional nodes. Um but for let's just say uh an apparel brand that's not that's volume is not exceptionally high, sometimes a single node is correct. If you're shipping, call it five thousand units a month and you've got 2000 plus SKUs for example, splitting that unless you have a couple hero products, splitting that in multiple nodes probably does not make sense because then you're gonna be doing a lot of split shipments, meaning you might have to ship you know the the black shirt and the blue shirt from two separate spots and that's going to completely crush your margins because you're gonna have to pay for you know two different fulfillment pick pack packaging and and shipping labels. Um, but for you know, a lot of brands, let's say the health, wellness, beauty space, food and bath that are often lower catalog, uh, you know, lower skew count catalogs. Um, you know, getting into three or four nodes, sometimes five nodes, can can make a lot of sense, massively improve the customer experience and drive down the costs. And then in the food and bed space, we work with a lot of ready to drink brands, um, which for a lot of time, you know, people, myself included, were questioning like, could can that actually even be a a strong business uh direct to consumer because it really is expensive to ship heavy goods and big especially like glass bottles.
Kurt Elster • 22:21.020
Oh man.
Casey Armstrong • 22:21.880
Yeah, glass bottles. We ship actually quite a few a lot of glass bottles, and then you have to take, of course, fragile into consideration. Um, but there, you know, once you start getting into like four or five nodes, you can just greatly reduce your fulfillment cost because now you're shipping everything what we call short zone or zone, you know, call it one to four max. And there's really there's really two levers to in to decrease what it costs for you to ship a good. One is reduce the the size or the weight of the good, which is often not a lever that brands have. We can actually get into ways that brands have done that. Um, but that's often not something you can do. Like a glass bottle filled with liquid is gonna always weigh a certain amount. Um, and the other is reducing the zone. And so Again, the the shipping um the shipping rate cards are essentially driven by weight or dimensional weight and then shipping zone. And so the shorter distance that you can ship that to your end consumer is is probably the biggest lever you have to reduce your costs.
Kurt Elster • 23:24.120
I was not prepared for that level of detail. Like you that one you're like, absolutely a hundred percent I know this. And I thought the answer was just gonna be like three to five Moving on.
Casey Armstrong • 23:34.840
Okay. We we we get that question a lot.
Kurt Elster • 23:37.480
Yeah. Well I get you're right. That makes sense.
Casey Armstrong • 23:43.560
I mean we pride ourselves in in fulfillment and and not trying to go in a bunch of other directions. And so yeah, we we get that question a lot.
Kurt Elster • 23:51.520
It's just fun when you ask a question and realize like a what you've walked into. Yeah. Oh wow. You're like this is this is where they really know their stuff. Oh my gosh. Um the okay, I want to shift gears to yeah, AI. What else? It's 2026. That's all we talk about, AI. What? So I man, I don't want to do anything outside of my terminal. I just want to live in the command prompt uh with my AI agent. You know, it'd feel very productive bossing it around. To do that, everything all the services I need have to give me a way for my AI to control it. You've done that with an MCP server. Which for, you know, in a a business context like fulfillment inventory makes a lot of sense. Talk to me about the the use cases there. Like how are people, once I've I can attach ship-bob to my A AI, what am I doing with that?
Casey Armstrong • 24:43.000
Yeah, so I'll cover two things and I'll answer that directly. It's it's been fascinating to see how people want to use our AI layer or the MCP. And so one is we did build Um, you know, one of our big bets was open protocol versus like the walled garden, but we also built our own AI agent that we call Bobby that lives in chipbob. That can is extremely powerful and we are building so much on top of that and we're building so much in internally on top of that from like so a chip um I'll get back to that in a sec. There's essentially like the merchant application, which a lot of people just think of what is shipbob. That's like your dashboard. That's what you log into every day. That's the top of the stack, let's call it. At the bottom, there's our warehouse management system or WMS that powers All of our facilities, we've got 70 plus around the world. They all use RWMS. In between, it's really our decision engine, which is like the brains of it all. And then on top of everything would be our API and our MCP. So But uh the point is is like the owning that entire stack is what's allowed us to do not just read, but also write. across everything at the AI layer, which is the important part that we'll get into. Again, it can't just be read. It can't just be this pretty dashboard. You gotta be able to write. You gotta be able to take action or else like, are you really saving time? Are you really adding value? with Bobby, the the agent, um there's so many interesting things that people do. And again, we're continuing to invest heavily into like what that means and like what we do internally around that, such as I don't know, things like claims or where is my order type stuff, stuff that comes up all the time. But the open protocol thing has been fascinating. And so, you know, we were pushing heavily on it earlier. We were proud to be the, you know, the first cloud-verified app over um on the on the fulfillment side. But the the usage and where we're seeing requests coming from, you know, from from Claude to OpenAI to cursor to Langchain to this like long tail of like these homegrown clients. It's it's pretty fascinating to see how people are using this and just using it all over the place. Um and so I think that's where these businesses, again, not just in the fulfillment space, but in general, that that really go with like the open protocol method, especially as people are starting to question like their costs on Cloud or OpenAI and as as those tokens get more expensive and and they might want to test um other models or um, you know, other agents, um, it's important, I think, to be able to to to plug into the gamut or a lot at least allow people to to pull from you in in multiple different ways.
Kurt Elster • 27:17.800
No, I I greatly I appreciate that approach, you know, because it fits the way a lot of us, especially developers, want to work. It's like I define my environment and then I get to choose which tools can connect to that. Yes, I think it's a good thing. And in the case of the LLM, increasingly it turns out those the LLMs are really they're going to be a commodity. You know, I really don't care. Like I have no Yeah. There's no difference between Claude, Grok and uh ChatGPT soul in, you know, when I'm just like, I just need something to do to execute these instructions. So just give me the one that works, right? And isn't gonna cost a fortune. So yeah, like the lack of loyalty there is kind of interesting, which is where it you know it's nice to to take the open approach, because then you don't have to worry about like what's the hot model, what do we have to build for which marketplace. Though you still didn't get the official plug-in. That's not easy either.
Casey Armstrong • 28:09.919
No, and I mean we're claude is definitely one of the outsized winners that's that's you know running away with the market along with open AI and and Groc as you mentioned and so Yeah, getting in there was important for us because so many of our customers were using it. That was a lot of the feedback we got. Um and Um also brands want to be able to tie in so many different sources into you know Claude alone, which is what I think you were alluding to, where it can't just be, again, with our agent, that's great because it's it's um Shabaab data to the extreme uh and also whatever you have flowing into that. But you know, if you're running you know, if you're running everything into Cloud and you want to pull from Shopify and you want to pull from Klaviyo and you want to pull from Net Suite or QuickBooks or you know some homegrown stuff that you've built as well, you can you can aggregate that all into one place. uh and really build whatever you want. And and it's also fascinating to see what what Claude and others continue to roll out. And so I think it was called I think it's called Claude Connect. that they rolled out recently. I don't know if you've used it at all, but it it it plugs into Slack and essentially allows you to you know, utilize Slack as as your agent and as your colleague. And so what you can do, actually this is one of the cool one of the cooler use cases I've seen from our customers is Um, so we again we talked about in inbound inventory earlier, which is what so many brands are thinking about right now. How do I get my inventory from my manufacturer to my fulfillment center to stack up both D2C and B2B for the holidays? Um, well, you need to submit like a purchase order or some information. In our world, it's called a warehouse receiving order. or WRO to your fulfillment center so they actually know what they should receive. Um and so for some brands it you know they might be small catalog and they're not shipping a lot. And so that that count might be pretty basic. But you know for some of the brands we work with, they've got thousands, if not over ten thousand SKUs. Uh some of them are sending us um, you know, hundreds of thousands of units at a time. Uh someone they're moving over, it's in the millions. But anyways, let's just say hundreds of thousands of units. To submit that as a PO is rather cumbersome. And if you're typing things in, Obviously that can get a bit complex and they might be coming on multiple containers at multiple times. And so where we've seen some of our customers really leverage it is they can just upload PDFs or screenshots into Slack And just say create a WRO in ship-bob essentially. They push the send button, it pushes it, loads it all up into ship-bob. Now the the WROs or the inbound orders are now it's registered into ship-ob. And then ShipBob will push back up into Slack all of the WROs that they need to give their manufacturer within, you know, call it 30 seconds. And so something that might have taken a brand five minutes at the lower end to you know, over thirty minutes at the higher end or or even longer if they had an extremely complex um, you know, inbound order, it can just be done in in a couple of minutes. And and when brands are sending an inventory multiple times a week or multiple times a month, you know, those those numbers add up real fast.
Kurt Elster • 31:25.779
Wrong address, wrong size, add one more. the same three emails every single day and every one is a ticket your team handles by hand. Read it, verify it, fix it in Shopify. email the customer back, do that a few hundred times a month, and you're paying salaries to be a manual order editing tool. Our sponsor, Cleverific, has been thinking about this for years. They've run order editing on Shopify since before it was a category. Now your shoppers can fix their own orders right on the order status page. Address, size, quantity, add-ons. No ticket, no back and forth, and everything writes straight back through Shopify. And here's what's new. Order upsells that build themselves. Cleverific reads your store's order history, generates post-purchase offers based on what your customers actually buy, and it works with the flows you already run. This summer, they'll even do the whole thing for you. Mention the unofficial Shopify podcast and Clever Effic will handle the complete setup, order editing, post-purchase upsells, all of it done for you. plus a $500 upsell credit to get you started. So stop editing orders for your customers. Let them do it themselves and let it pay for itself. Clever Effect Order Editing on the Shopify App Store. Some of that like really detailed, time consuming, hands-on data entry work. Oh man, that's the stuff an AI agent's not gonna complain about. Yeah, it is it's an excellent use case to be able to to get that stuff off a person's plate. You know, and you still have a human in the loop that checks it 'cause AI does goofy things from time to time, but for the most part, that's just a great time savings, even if I do have to occasionally correct it.
Casey Armstrong • 32:59.340
Yes, a hundred percent.
Kurt Elster • 33:01.260
All right, other new as a ship bob the SAS service has another uh feature I wanted to ask you about. I'm familiar with Shopify's Shop Promise. You launched Shitbob Promise delivery dates at checkout. That's like well the Shop Promise one appears in on the PDP, right? Versus Shibbob This is in checkout.
Casey Armstrong • 33:21.240
Um they both can appear at the PDP in checkout.
Kurt Elster • 33:24.040
Okay. So tell me about tell me about Chipotle Promise.
Casey Armstrong • 33:27.880
Yeah, I mean at the end of the day, we we know that one of the biggest levers that brands have is the trust at the PDP and the trust at the checkout level that your product will get delivered there not just quickly, but you know, on a certain date. Uh and our Chief Supply Chain Officer Melissa Nick, she's been here for for quite a few years now. She helped run North America fulfillment for Amazon for for quite a while. And so she saw firsthand the power Of you know, that that estimated delivery date to the end consumer and the and the trust that that builds. Obviously, Amazon has done that better than anybody and has really set the standard there. Um, and so you know, just seeing the the value to the sellers from like a conversion rate standpoint and and the trust that it builds with the end consumer, we we've always known that that was you know, a North Star and something that we needed needed to deliver to to all of our customers, big and small. And so yeah, we've we've rolled that out and um Again, it's like to be able to provide that level of of trust to the brands and and the end consumers has been pretty amazing to see. And it's something that we'll continue to invest in heavily for sure.
Kurt Elster • 34:43.220
The okay, switch of gears to Blast from the Past. You were involved with uh a e com business Watchmaster, right?
Casey Armstrong • 34:51.700
Yes.
Kurt Elster • 34:52.340
Watchmaster. And you had a early one of your successes, because that was it was a successful business, was um arbitrage play, where you used a crawler and you would undercut Google prices. So you always had the lowest prices of Google Shopping. Do you think that would still work today?
Casey Armstrong • 35:09.680
It depends how your competitors advertise. And so just to I guess get people Up to speed. So we sold so we didn't have our own watches. We would sell popular watches from the major watch brands like Rolex, Brightling, Tyquoyer, Omega. And so you knew that there was like very specific SKUs. So for example, the Rolex, like the the most popular. So if you look at like the like the kind of the 80-20 rules, 80% of the sales came from Rolex, and then 20% of the sales came from everybody else. Honestly, it was more like 90-10, but let's just call it 80-20. And so Rolex basically drove all the sales. Within Rolex, Like let's call it the 80-20, they were almost all submariner. It wasn't as high as 80%, but submariner was by far the most popular. Um that's what you see Sean Connery wearing in James Bond and The Dive Watch. And so what we knew is we could see who are our major competitors and then associate that specific skew with what they were advertising out from like a Google perspective. And so we would crawl that and then we'd do math based off of like what we acquired the watch for, what our target margin was. And then we'd always round down to like the nearest five or zero. So that we were slightly underneath. Because then at the end of the day, as long as we have the trust of the consumer, uh, we're still selling what is relatively a commodity compared to the others because it's it's still if it's a brand new uh you know Rolex of Mariner, um, it's still the same watch. Uh and so again, we always want to undercut from that perspective. And so there, I think that there are brands that can find competitors like Um I'm I'm wearing True Classic right now. You know, they've been a great customer for us. There are they face intense pressure from others. They might say, hey, maybe Maybe Nike or Viore aren't competitors of ours, but like who are their competitors? And so people are searching for black t-shirts or I don't know, Blue Henleys, like there are more one-to-one competitors. I think these D to C brands are trying to create more of a brand to separate. So it's not just a like a pricing war, but it is something to look at. And I think You know, with the the with the tools that we built internally and the scrapers we had to build at Watchmaster, what you can do now with AI as especially as a non-technical person, like is pretty fascinating. Um and so I think a combination of of compet you know competitive intelligence from a pricing perspective and also like where and how to price. And also where and how to like put your your free shipping um discounts, you know, based off of like a lot more data. Uh, you know, I think what the brands can do today is is much different than what we were doing back in whatever that was, like, you know, twenty fifteen.
Kurt Elster • 38:02.020
The I'm glad I asked. Yeah, that would I just that I found it in researching you and thought it was such an interesting an interesting tactic. And I'm like, you know, and with AI, right away I was like, oh you someone could readily build this again. When you did it, it would have been a lot harder.
Casey Armstrong • 38:17.800
Um Yeah, it was a lot harder, but um it and especially if you think of like where Where are you driving your sales? And for us, a lot of it was on Google Shopping. And if you think about like what's the job of an ad, it's to get the click. And then, of course, what's the job of the PDP is to get them to check out. Or at least m move move the product to the cart. And so if you think of just like these staggered steps, if if you're you know, if you're showing up if you're doing a bunch of like Facebook ads, for example, or TikTok ads. Will that be beneficial? Maybe not. But things like Google shopping and other spots where people are seeing like multiple options You know, brands should 100% be trying to do stuff like that.
Kurt Elster • 38:57.599
My my final question here, I'm gonna take a swing for the fences. Uh shipbob IPO. Rumor?
Casey Armstrong • 39:03.540
Whether that is or isn't, like we can't comment on those things. I mean our our job is to build uh you know, a a really big, sustainable, profitable business that supports our customers and and that's what will allow us to continue to grow a lot. And And we've been fortunate to to do that so far. So, you know, we'll we'll continue pushing on that.
Kurt Elster • 39:23.700
That sounds good to me. Uh all right. At what volume does it just flat out does not make sense to be picking and packing your own orders?
Casey Armstrong • 39:32.660
That's probably the question I get the most along with the placement question. When you start to see the time that you spend doing the fulfillment, impacting what is like your true differentiator as a founder or founding team, that's when you need to start, I think, looking for a fulfillment partner. And so very few foundy founders or founding teams is like operations or supply chain like their 10x differentiator. It's usually product development or understanding this like key gap in the market or maybe it's marketing. There's a handful that you often see bubble up. Again, it's a very very uh seldomly supply chain. And so once you start seeing, hey, picking and packing these goods is taking me away from talking to customers or, you know really maxing out my my landing pages or my ad sets, you should be looking elsewhere. Um I I got to spend some time with um Tyler McCann, who's the CEO of Taysal Lude last week. And we were actually talking about something similar. It was like, because he's they've been with us essentially from day one. And I was like, how'd you even come across us? And uh so his co-founder has um had a really big YouTube following uh and and s and promoted their product and on day one they basically sold out of everything they had which was like 500 units and so they had let's just call it 500 orders. He's like, oh, we thought that would take us a couple orders to pick, pack, ship those out. He's like, it took us like four days and we hated every second of it. And Tyler also knows a supply chain exceptionally well. Uh and so he's like immediately we're like, we need to find somebody that can just do this for us so we can go on doing what we do best. And so I think once again, once you start seeing um you know, pick pack distracting you from from you know your your superpower, you should definitely be looking for a partner.
Kurt Elster • 41:20.620
All right. Final question. Casey Armstrong, where do we find more information about you and Shipbob?
Casey Armstrong • 41:26.040
Yeah, Shabab. com. Um we actually rolled out um our podcast recently, so unpacked uh. com. Um and or unpackpod. com and yeah, I mean if you're it the time the time crunch is here and so if if If you're looking for a new partner for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, reach out. You know, we don't we don't have any blackout dates. We're always bringing on new brands, but I would highly suggest looking to move over sooner than not. Uh and yeah, reach out anytime.
Kurt Elster • 41:57.840
Casey Armstrong, Ship Bob. Thank you so much.
Casey Armstrong • 42:00.720
Kurt, thank you.
Kurt Elster • 42:03.280
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