DEV Community: junaid33

Scaling your e-commerce business using hybrid fulfillment

junaid33 — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 20:42:15 +0000

Exponential growth

E-commerce is growing faster than many ever thought. More and more people are launching websites and creating Amazon seller accounts.

Why wouldn’t they? It has the lowest barrier of entry of any business you can start. You can get up and running in a few days. You don’t need a warehouse and you don’t necessarily even need inventory.

Some sellers will start by holding inventory and some will start by dropshipping. But how can a seller really gain an advantage in such a saturated market that more people are entering every minute? The answer is hybrid fulfillment. Hybrid fulfillment (or multi channel fulfillment) is fulfilling your orders using different channels. Your supplier, 3PL, any fulfillment provider are considered channels.

Let’s say you are dropshipping some products and shipping other products yourself.

Let’s say you are holding and shipping all of your inventory but decide to dropship 1 item to see if it’s worth buying in bulk.

Let’s say you want to sell your items in new geographical areas like the UK or Australia which will need their own supplier or warehouse.

Hybrid fulfillment

All of these are examples hybrid fulfillment. It helps you increase your catalog size, expand to new places, and in the end, get more orders and scale.

You're wondering why all e-commerce businesses don't do this. The problem is that managing multiple fulfillment channels is not simple. The elite e-commerce brands and companies use expensive ERP systems like SAP to achieve this or build their own custom backend. They also have a team of dedicated engineers to maintain and update the system as they scale.

We sought out to bring the benefits of hybrid fulfillment to small and medium e-commerce businesses. That’s where Openship comes in.

Openship

Openship’s humble beginnings were that of Zapier and Google Sheets which is how we handled hybrid fulfillment early on. It eventually grew into a full-fledged hybrid fulfillment platform where any supplier and fulfillment system could be connected and switched between seamlessly.

Internally, it helped us expand into new markets, grow our catalog size, and launch new stores in weeks, not months.

After years of hard work, Openship 1.0 is finally here. Use us to scale your e-commerce business and never be locked into a supplier or fulfillment system.

Be sure to check out the website, documentation, and demo. Let us know if you have any feedback.

Using Open-source to Disrupt Marketplaces

junaid33 — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 19:25:33 +0000

UPDATE: Openship is going closed-source. I will be considering open-sourcing it once the product has matured. Openship will also be incorporating open-source ethos in other ways.

Disruption

"Disruption innovation," a term coined in the mid-90's, is used to describe a phenomenon where small business owners can build simpler, lower-priced products to take on less agile, established companies who have begun to focus on enterprise sales.

We have been seeing this for decades, but one that intrigues the most is the rise of Shopify against Amazon.

Amazon was one of the earliest places to sell items online in the early 2000s. It provided a dashboard for sellers to handle inventory, returns, customer service, etc. As Amazon grew, they increased seller fees and even started to private label items that 3rd party sellers had established.

Actions like these allowed Shopify to attract users who wanted to own their actionable data and not be locked-in to a single platform. Additionally, Shopify and other startups like Deliverr are building fulfillment systems in hopes to rival Amazon's FBA program.

This is having a very profound effect: It's shifting power back to the individual sellers.

Marketplace

As sellers are getting access to a seller dashboard and fulfillment systems, the next step is the marketplace.

The best way to build a seller-focused marketplace would be a system that allowed users to bring their own dashboard, fulfillment system, payment processor, etc. The marketplace would simply push orders to their existing system. The marketplace would adapt to you, not the other way around.

That is the goal of Openship.

Openship

Openship is an open-source Shopify application that allows you to connect and manage all your shops' operations from one dashboard. It allows you to dropship items from AliExpress and Amazon, but also route your orders to your own inventory stores like FBA, ShipBob, or a custom 3PL solution. Dropshipping is a good way to test items before buying in bulk; however, the model is not sustainable in the long-run. Building a brand and differentiating are the next steps and Openship allows that transition smoothly without being locked-in to any fulfillment service or platform.

Within this platform, we are building a tightly integrated marketplace where users can list their products for others using the platform to source from. This will include one-time orders or bulk buying and private labelling.

Since users are bringing their own backends, the marketplace has an industry low seller fee of 4%.

Open-source

If the platform is truly seller-focused, it needs to be extendable and built with the seller in mind. That's why being open-source made complete sense. Users can integrate their current and future operations, not be locked-in, and run their own instance using their own server or serverless architecture.

Openship will operate as an open core model. It provides a platform and the marketplace is the monetization. This will align our goals with those of our users. Their success will be linked with ours.

You can check out the Github repo and docs.

Future

We believe this business model can be used to disrupt more marketplaces like Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Upwork, HotelTonight, etc. Great open source software will provide users with great UI and functionality while the marketplace will allow them to tap into outside sales.

Openship - Open source dropshipping application and more

junaid33 — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 18:29:39 +0000

Openship started as a personal backend to manage my e-commerce shops. Inventory for my shops were coming from multiple sources like Amazon, Aliexpress, Rakuten 3PL, ShipBob, etc. Before, I was using Zapier and Google Sheets to manage routing of orders, returns, and replacements, but realized I could optimize more by connecting with the APIs directly. That's when I decided to build Openship.

Openship is a Shopify application that allows you to connect and manage all your shops' operations from one dashboard. It allows you to dropship items from Aliexpress and Amazon, but also route your orders to your own inventory stores like FBA, ShipBob, or a custom 3PL solution. Dropshipping is a good way to test items before buying in bulk, but the model is not sustainable in the long-run. Building a brand and differentiating are the next steps and Openship allows that transition smoothly without being locked-in to any fulfillment service or platform.

Openship is also a development tool. It allows you to access Shopify's GraphQL Admin API for each of your shops using the built-in GraphQL Playground. You can make quick changes to your products or orders right from the dashboard. You can also make micro applications that use the API. For example, our customer service agents found it cumbersome to locate an order's tracking. We built a simple input where the agent could enter the customer's name, address, or order name and it would fetch the tracking. Internally, we have also built micro applications that open tickets when we are contacted, send replacements for lost items, handle returns, buy more inventory when our Rakuten 3PL inventory is running low, etc. We plan to clean these up and release them as well.

What's the catch? How can you offer this application for free and have it be open source? How do you plan to monetize?

All great questions. Our goal is simple. Provide an intuitive operations backend with a clean UI that can be customized and adapted. Within this dashboard, we are building a marketplace where users can list their products for others using the platform to source from. This includes one-time orders or bulk buying and private labelling. The marketplace will have an industry low seller fee of 4%.

This is called an open core model. We are providing an application and then monetizing around that free service. We believe this will align our goals with those of our users since their success will be linked with ours.

Tech Stack

React.js
Next.js
Evergreen UI
Koa.js

You can read more about the tech stack here.