Drop Shipping is difficult, costly and all too often not as profitable as it should be. That is a universal truth. A big part of that comes from everything required to meet your customer’s expectations. And by “customer” I mean not only the end consumer that you’re shipping to, but also the retail marketplace that you are using to reach the consumer.
Consumer expectations are getting higher almost every day. If they order something at 3:00am Saturday morning, they want to see an acknowledgement, tracking number and expected delivery date very quickly. They also expect to receive that order in a few days at most.
Marketplaces also have increasingly high expectations. After all, they need to enhance their brand, move ahead of their competition and reduce their order cost to a minimum. More and more, they want their suppliers to drop ship from their own warehouse rather than one of their fulfillment centers, provide acknowledgement, tracking number, ship it in three (3) days maximum, provide accurate invoicing and provide them with accurate item inventory updates.
Unfortunately the tools they give you to do this are cumbersome and labor intensive, causing most suppliers to cobble disparate technologies together to ease some of that labor intensity. This usually includes things like an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP system), a method to translate, send and receive data to / from the marketplace, software to automate management of that data and software to communicate with shipping carriers – all of which usually still requires some level of dedicated staff and time to ensure everything goes smoothly.
In 2014, a drop ship supplier experiencing these growing customer expectations and technology challenges, came to us, Cityon Systems, a software development company, and said “there has to be a better way to do this!”
This led to the birth of OPAL, the first and only smart platform that combines all of the needed capabilities into one place for drop shipping. It automates and enhances your ERP order processing capability, requires no human intervention, works 365×24, is fully compliant with all marketplace requirements, provides document data translation and transmission without errors at zero cost, and works with your 3PL or warehouse to provide all labels and information needed to pick, pack, ship and track an order.
And, best of all, it will process those drop ship orders in less than 8 seconds.