In this episode of Commerce Famous, host Ben Marks chats with Eric Erway, Vice President of Product at ShipperHQ, and a former Magento product leader. Eric brings his wealth of experience from his time at Dell, Magento, and Cart.com to explore the intricacies of ecommerce logistics and fulfillment. They dive deep into how ShipperHQ is transforming the shipping experience by providing merchants with powerful tools to optimize shipping costs, offer real-time rates, and streamline the customer experience. Eric shares insights into how advanced analytics, dimensional packing, and carrier backup rates are helping businesses save money and meet customer expectations in an Amazon-dominated world. Tune in to hear about Eric’s career journey, the future of ecommerce logistics, and how data-driven decisions are reshaping the shipping landscape for merchants worldwide. Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs. Find out more at: www.shopware.com/en/
In this episode of Commerce Famous, host Ben Marks chats with Eric Erway, Vice President of Product at ShipperHQ, and a former Magento product leader. Eric brings his wealth of experience from his time at Dell, Magento, and Cart.com to explore the intricacies of ecommerce logistics and fulfillment.
They dive deep into how ShipperHQ is transforming the shipping experience by providing merchants with powerful tools to optimize shipping costs, offer real-time rates, and streamline the customer experience. Eric shares insights into how advanced analytics, dimensional packing, and carrier backup rates are helping businesses save money and meet customer expectations in an Amazon-dominated world.
Tune in to hear about Eric’s career journey, the future of ecommerce logistics, and how data-driven decisions are reshaping the shipping landscape for merchants worldwide.
Eric Erway on LinkedIn
ShipperHQ on LinkedIn
Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs.
Ben Marks [00:00:36]:
Hey, everyone, welcome to Commerce Famous. I'm your host, Ben Marks, and with me today is a dear former colleague and still industry colleague, as is often the case, my friend Eric Erway, with whom I spent some time in the trenches at an e commerce platform company just before its acquisition by a large company whose name rhymes with Fladobi. Welcome to Commerce Famous. How are you, my friend?
Eric Erway [00:01:09]:
Good, Ben, it's so good to see you and good to hear from you. So thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, yeah, we've, you know, we spend a lot of time together and so looking forward to talk a little bit more today and seeing how your world is going as well.
Ben Marks [00:01:22]:
Yeah, it's been, what, many, many times, many continents. You know, I think in our industry, it's always great to be out with your ecosystem, whether it's an event that you're creating or not. And, you know, I actually wanted to open up because you've got a long history in, you know, in and around this industry. But before your time in product at Magento, I know you were at Dell, and before that, you were at AOL. For those of you who maybe have a little bit of. Of salt in your peppery hair, that is. Yeah, that's going way back. But I wanted to bring up something that I was actually just telling the story yesterday, and I realized I tell the story regularly, talking about the importance of connecting with an audience.
Ben Marks [00:02:13]:
And I remember you like one of my. I think my Keystone memory for you is seeing you on stage at Magento live in Australia. And I wanna say this was like maybe 2015 or something, or mid two thousand ten s, and you were on a small stage in a smaller room, kicking off what was gonna become a really important component of the event space, which was the merchant to merchant roundtable. And so you were on stage, you were kicking off, like, topics, sort of framing the general discussion. And what we had was we had, you know, these big round tables, conference roundtables, chocolate block, with merchants of all varying sizes and backgrounds. And then every table also had a person from the company there to help with the conversation. But ideally, just to listen and take notes and oh my goodness. This to this day, is still one of the best initiatives I think I've ever come across from a product company.
Ben Marks [00:03:14]:
Because very quickly you realize that it's weird when a whole bunch of strangers sit down at a table and then are asked to discuss something without really any significant introduction. But man, once we introduce people like, well, I have problems, you know, we can't, we don't, our emails aren't going through. So we think there's a problem with the platform settings and then someone else will try to, oh no, no, no, we solved that problem. And then once that happens, the whole table just opens up and every topic was on it. How did you know, were you involved with the conception of that? Did you know? You certainly were involved with the execution. And I'm curious, for these kind of events where you put merchants with each other, you know, what kind of benefit do you see?
Eric Erway [00:03:57]:
Yeah, no, that's, I love those times as well. I've made reference to those activities a couple times in the past because reality is you're creating micro communities, you're creating groups that really become powerful and in some cases probably have more in common than, you know, more in common than they thought at first. Right. And so, you know, there was high demand for those in each and every events, the small events, the larger events, I can't take credit for the conception of those. Definitely actively participated them. And I think it really countered some of the things we're doing on the product design side. And so we, we had the merchant and merchant sessions and we also had the design thinking workshops. Right.
Eric Erway [00:04:35]:
And so we're, you know, and that included merchants, partners and developers. And he still had the same spirit of empathy, so had the spirit of ideation, testing ideas, and really that Groupthink exercise. And I think in the end, I think people were always really impressed and surprised at the end of that hour, 2 hours or what have you on what they came out with, they were very, very popular. There was some Sort of epiphany, Handful of things they can follow up on, a new friend, a new colleague, and that was the Community. Right. And so I think it, you know, we kind of say this casually, but we started to realize very quickly that the Community is the product. So much of what we did in the product itself was a byproduct of what we gave away, which was the process and things like that, especially for merchants and partners that don't have those resources themselves. But it's just the act of doing.
Eric Erway [00:05:27]:
Anybody can get together but you've created merchant to merchant tables, you've created materials, you've created workshops, you've done these things, you facilitate those. But, like, that's really where the magic happens. So, yeah, I've referenced those a couple times in the past as some of the best moments, for sure.
Ben Marks [00:05:45]:
Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source e commerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25 billion in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in e commerce@shopware.com. dot.
Ben Marks [00:06:05]:
Yeah, again, when you're building for this broad audience, you don't have a specific niche that you're just tweaking and optimizing. These just atomic or really hyper granular things. You really have to build that kind of connective tissue that puts you, puts you in the product organization or even underneath, go to engineering that much closer to your actual audience. And the insights that come out of these moments are great. Now your experience goes. So again, you spent time at AOL. Now, I think it's just strictly a media property. And then around the mid two thousands, you found your way into Della.
Ben Marks [00:06:53]:
And, you know, Adele, you were involved with their web front end. And I remember, I mean, this was a period of time, you know, I think the two thousands, I was, you know, I actually, I had Adele, I was like one of the five people that bought a Rambus based. Ah, yeah, love that. Yeah. I mean, it was like, oh, man, this is gonna be the future. No, it definitely was not the future. It was the future of me paying way too much for Ramdhenne modules. Yeah, that was painful.
Ben Marks [00:07:25]:
That was a painful lesson. Yeah. Almost as painful as we all learned. Almost as painful as not buying Nvidia a year ago.
Eric Erway [00:07:33]:
No kidding.
Ben Marks [00:07:34]:
But what was, so if you look at what Dell was doing, this is a complex interface with kitted products, lots of options and configurations, and really just a lot of information to present to various buyer Personas. Because you have some people, I'm sure, who just come in and they're like, I know exactly the specs I want. And then you have other people going, I have no idea what I want. What was that like as Dell came along? What was that like trying to understand and then deliver against such a broad set of requirements? I mean, it's almost as broad as trying to build an e commerce platform for all sorts of people.
Eric Erway [00:08:20]:
No, for sure. I love this question. I haven't. It's been a cup of coffee since I've kind of thought about the days of those, but there's a lot of parallels, honestly, that's happened between those. And even back at the AOL days, where in the case of Dell, we had a design team, we had a product team, some of which actually went over to that same platform we were just talking about, worked at in the past. But it comes down to research, it comes down to empathy, talking to customers. At one point in the earlier days of Dell, we said, hey, we need a user research facility. This is before Zoom, things like that.
Eric Erway [00:08:53]:
And so I said, what about that team room over there? What about those two teams over there? And we created a research lab with a one way mirror between two team rooms that didn't exist for that. And so it's pretty sophisticated, I would say, at the time. And we spent a lot of time talking to customers, and Dell, to its credit, had a lot of data behind that. But in those earlier days, that data continued to support where you would have millions and millions of configurations for, let's say, your favorite laptop. It only really represented about 10% of anything that was yet unique. We had to spend more and more time making sure that people felt like they had the customization, what we call the configurator back then, but really making sure that it was simple enough so that we could fulfill that. Because, of course, custom systems take time and cost money. There's a lot of complexity in doing so.
Eric Erway [00:09:43]:
There was constantly moving at both sides. But I think probably the biggest thing I worked on there was. I think towards the end, there was something we end up patenting that involved natural language search, where even people talked about that, basically taking symptoms that people saw. So this is like in the support side. So you have a technical issue, seeing a blue scream of death, and people didn't know what was happening. They said, I just have a blue screen of death. I don't know what to do from that. But it was a symptom based approach that then allowed you to go through different channels of, like talk to somebody at Dell or take a look at a knowledge base article, or double check and see if they're in a warranty and start to look at the decisioning and the trees beyond that.
Eric Erway [00:10:25]:
In a way, that was almost like an app, and it was a bit ahead of its time in many ways, but I was really excited about that. And there were some commerce applications to that. A lot of research. We flew around the world because Telzigal company invalidated that in places in Asia and Europe and others to make sure we had the right approach for that. But, yeah, learned a lot. But there's a lot of parallels because it always comes back to, always comes back to making sure that you're targeting customers. Even in then, they were also thinking about b two B and b two c. And that was very apparent.
Ben Marks [00:10:58]:
And this is, well, actually, I'm glad you said that. I'd completely forgotten about in zero five, I was basically on round two of a consumer auto racing startup. And I remember having to buy. I had much more responsibility a couple of years after the first iteration failed. And so I was responsible for finding hardware. And I remember actually, I think there was a different experience if you were going, if you're going after equipment from a business buyer perspective rather than a consumer buyer perspective. No idea what that looks like. I mean, dell always a little bit ahead of its time.
Ben Marks [00:11:35]:
I just actually, recently I just pulled this up. I don't know if you've seen this. I'm going to share this with you, actually. Let's see. This does nothing for anyone on podcasts. What I'm doing is there is a, there is a tweet from Michael Dell. So just. Michael Dell is his handle on Twitter.
Ben Marks [00:11:56]:
I refuse to call it X March 17, 2018. And you can probably find it out there, but I don't know if you can see this, Eric. The tweet says, the first financial statement for the one I used to convince my parents that it was okay for me to not go back to college. And I mean, if you look at it, I mean, two things stand out, like right away. One, this is 1984. This thing is typed out. For real. Typed out.
Ben Marks [00:12:28]:
A lot of the comments on there help qualify because I'm not the kind of person who is looking at balance sheets closely. A lot of people say, wow, this is really well organized, the various line items and everything. But you see, okay, so for that 1st first quarter, this first quarter report, you know, sales of 900,000, again, this is 84, you know, basically. And the long and short of it, total operating expenses, 63,000. Earnings from operations, $134,000. You know, in a quarter. For a kid in college in the.
Eric Erway [00:13:05]:
In the eighties, that's a lot more money than it is now.
Ben Marks [00:13:08]:
Yeah. I mean, that's, that's probably, you know, you take 134, this is probably multiple there. What was probably. Yeah. I mean, that's substantial.
Eric Erway [00:13:25]:
It is.
Ben Marks [00:13:26]:
Wow. Yeah, about 300. Yeah. So it's a good track. 300. 300k in today's dollars for a college kid. So that seems like a good incubator for someone growing up. In a product discipline.
Ben Marks [00:13:37]:
And you were a Dell for, you were Adele for what, 2006 to like, seven years.
Eric Erway [00:13:44]:
Wow.
Ben Marks [00:13:45]:
Eight years.
Eric Erway [00:13:45]:
Seven. Eight years, yeah.
Ben Marks [00:13:46]:
Wow.
Eric Erway [00:13:46]:
Yep.
Ben Marks [00:13:48]:
Now, eventually, you found your way over into the wonderful, wonderful world of the e commerce platform side. How did that come around?
Eric Erway [00:13:57]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, can't take full credit for that. I think, you know, there were a couple of colleagues that I worked with at Dell that started seeing this ecosystem, and at the same time, Dell was looking, you know, looking to move to an e commerce platform themselves. And so it was a bit of, a bit of fate, right? Because, you know, we ended up not going with said platform because there was a bespoke system that just had so much, you know, it had to be custom at the time, did all the analysis, et cetera, but in that process, kind of discovered something really, really special with this other platform. And so a couple of us actually went over probably six or so both in the product and the design team at that time. And, you know, just, you know, conversations still remember it during Christmas. Hey, come on.
Eric Erway [00:14:41]:
Come on over. I think you're going to like this over here. If you're ready for an adventure. Let's go. And that was, gosh, that was 2015. 2015 or so and January 2015. Here we go. I fell in love with it from the very first time, both in what we did and how we did it.
Eric Erway [00:14:59]:
We're right in the verge of a major release from that one. But it's back to the same fundamentals we did at Della, much of which are the same people things we did at AOL, which brought the, you know, brought the customer, really the user front and center. And what seems very obvious is often the parts that get skipped. It's the same thing. Like, if you ever watch someone else use a consumer product, the telltale example is like, when you see someone trying to use at a subway, trying to get a card, use money, and there's like, seven post its over there. You realize those seven post its are a sign of a really bad experience problem. There's a bad product going on right there. And so you're just watching that.
Eric Erway [00:15:35]:
You don't work for the company. You just want to be able to share that with somebody who can make change for that. So when you're at a product company, we're into this platform, you start to see these opportunities, and you're trying to create those post events, you're trying to uncover those. And then working tightly with the product teams, a lot of which have moved on to some really great things beyond that. You work on fixing those. Like, it's one thing about saying that you actually making small changes and then starting to work towards something much larger for that. And so, yeah, it started off with, I think, a lot of what we learned, kind of a big company. And to their credit, Dell really had, their.com division was kind of a smaller outfit inside the larger company, which I had already liked, but then moving into it, there's a lot to kind of leverage and learn from that in terms of the fundamentals, how we did things into a community that's much larger, I think, a lot more intimate, a lot more close, and a lot more depth in history than I'd experienced before.
Eric Erway [00:16:25]:
I've never seen anybody with a Dell tattoo. Magento.
Ben Marks [00:16:28]:
Magento tattoos were in other places.
Eric Erway [00:16:31]:
I was like, wow, this is. This is real. This is getting real for this. This must be something. Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:16:35]:
The cultural touchstone for Dell was like, the dude, you're getting a Dell kid.
Eric Erway [00:16:39]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:16:40]:
You know, actually. But I wanted to underscore what you were talking about the. I love the idea of, like, the. The IRL heat map lab that you all had, because this was, you know, this was before. Gosh, what's the hot jar? Wait, what are the. What are the heat mapping applications?
Eric Erway [00:16:55]:
Hot jar is a good one. We use that. Yeah, we use that at chipper right now. So we love.
Ben Marks [00:16:58]:
And I want to get to, of course, the. The salient feature of your career with shipper hq. But I've forgotten about your experience coming into the Magento world at the time. Very mature ecosystem right around that divestiture or separation from eBay into private equity. And you were coming in in 2015, the year of the infamous Magento two release, which, you know, you had the benefit of not being responsible for that. For that. Soft baked a little bit.
Eric Erway [00:17:37]:
Little bit, but not.
Ben Marks [00:17:37]:
Yeah, soft baked mess. But in the end, had to work through and then work in work after the transition acquisition by Adobe. And then from there, you went over to cart.com, which I think. And we have a great sales leader that went from Magento over to cart, Gary Spector. He's kind of left the e commerce world, but he's totally kicking ass at Servpro as their CEO. I mean, and anyone that's met the guy, this is someone, I think if you can find a way to work for him, you just do because he is that much of a leader and he demands a lot of his team. But I think it pales in comparison to what he demands from himself. And I think that's just a great way to lead.
Ben Marks [00:18:22]:
What was your time? You know, you and I kind of ran into each other at a couple trade shows because I jumped over to shopware. What was your time at cartoon like?
Eric Erway [00:18:29]:
You know, it was great. I was there for about a year and a half or so, and for, you know, when I kind of step back and look at it, I, you know, I learned a lot more about fulfillment and logistics. Right. And so I had a little bit, a little bit of that back in the adobe days. But, you know, talk about a company that is really at the, you know, really at the bare metal, really at where fulfillment is happening. Learned a lot about that. Right. And so I think it kind of helped me, help me build that muscle a bit.
Eric Erway [00:18:54]:
Yeah. Smaller company. So I think in many ways, I like the smallness of that and really kind of owning our own destiny around what was a particularly interesting problem, which was how do we integrate these eight to ten properties at once? And so if you think about other companies have done this outside of commerce, like a zapier or an alloy or something like that, how do you pull that into something that is a really special commerce product that can make a difference in the market where maybe you don't need to pick and choose the various pieces of that? So I think the mission was always, I think mischievous was great team move really fast. But I think I look back, I learned a lot about moving fast, a little bit more on the fulfillment and logistics side, and really continue to feel like shipping. And a lot of these experiences are some of the more underserved in our market. It's funny because it's like other areas, but literally your first experience, a lot of products is often the last model of first forgotten and may not be in the hands of that, that retailer. It's going to be with a carrier, it's going to be with what have you. And so just being really crisp about that, it's very underserved.
Eric Erway [00:19:57]:
That's a word I use a lot.
Ben Marks [00:19:59]:
I only know the space. I'm only familiar with the space because of just the natural, the adjacency there. I have to say that word, by the way, once a podcast, the adjacency between e commerce and obviously the fulfillment. Fulfillment. We also know another great leader who's moved over into the fulfillment space and a great strategy person, Peter Sheldon, who may have even been responsible for the merchant to merchant session. I don't know, that sounds like something he would come up with. It does, but I would say fulfillment logistics, that is the third rail of e commerce. That is where you make or break the entire experience.
Ben Marks [00:20:42]:
You could say the buyer journey from acquisition all the way through whatever their path they're funnel is into, you know, into the checkout. Like that checkout experience I think is also, that is a waypoint along the way to customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. But then, yeah, I mean, you could have the most perfect targeting, personalization, acquisition, everything. And then if it falls, if the buyer does not get what he or she expects in terms of, you know, delivery estimation, delivery costs, delivery condition, then, yeah, basically all of that work that led up to that completely for naught. And then I think actually the downside potential is much, much. Maybe if you could quantify it an order of magnitude higher than just getting people what they expect on time. And I think I would say that maybe we have Amazon to thank for that because, you know, on my small island, I see, you know, 15 Amazon trucks and I work in a windowless office. So, so, you know, they're out and about.
Ben Marks [00:21:54]:
They're always buzzing. You might get two or three deliveries in a day. And with that, with those kind of stakes, you are now working at the dangerous end of the knife or the dangerous side of the knife. So you took this, you kind of parlayed your knowledge, your experience from cart over to our dear friend Joe Baker's company, ShipperHQ, Nay, Webshop apps. You've been there for not even just a few quarters now, right?
Eric Erway [00:22:28]:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I just started there about the beginning of the year. So a little over. A little over.
Ben Marks [00:22:32]:
So this is probably the part of the episode that's going to be most interesting to people. What in the hell is it like at this end of the business? There are a lot of things for me, and let me make sure I understand the sort of the problem space like shipper hq as a product is there to give, to basically expose and provide the opportunity for fine grained controls for store operations folks to say, like, okay, hey, here we know, here's what the rates are going to be, the services, the service level expectations. And under these conditions, we want to present these options to, to these sets of buyers. Right. And anyone that's worked in e commerce knows that, especially in a checkout flow, doing this right. And doing this in as frictionless a way as possible is extraordinarily difficult. And I would say on your side of the house, it must be really, really difficult because you are dealing with a whole bunch of third parties. Right.
Ben Marks [00:23:28]:
And you have to consume, you have to consume what their output is. You have to figure out, you know, how to provide a seamless and consistent service and make everything basically seem a lot less complicated than it is. Is that a fair characterization?
Eric Erway [00:23:43]:
Yeah, I think we're good now. And you summed it up nicely. I think we solve a lot of problems on both sides. One way to look at Chipper HQ is that we're solving a lot of the complexity that happens in between the carriers and the platforms. And so we support pretty much any platform you can imagine. Pretty much any carrier you can imagine really nailing down that experience at the rate level. So that minute that you see a rate that is from care x, Y or z, is it the lowest, is it the most efficient? Is it going to get there on time? Does it represent an optimal rate? If you've ever sold anything yourself on eBay, you realize that something like dimensional packing and shipping might be really helpful. There was Quinton in one of our key customers bar displays back in January.
Eric Erway [00:24:31]:
We're talking about like stacking mannequins and so like you, Matt, like, there's a very expensive way to ship that, but if you kind of, you know, nest those in a way that's, you know, you're going to save a lot of money in that. And so there's, there's a lot of magic in shipping. There's a lot of, you know, we talk a lot about optimizing shipping spend. So as a merchant, that's, that's one of your primary costs for that one. But as a, as an in shopper, that's one of your primary pain points. It's one of the reasons why people, and we have a lot of data to support this well over half, and I think in some cases two thirds to 70% abandoned carts because of that shipping cost. You're right, Amazon has reset the bar of those expectations. They expect everything to be free and that's absorbed and they look at it in terms of volume and prime and things like that.
Eric Erway [00:25:14]:
But not everybody can play that game. It's about a matter of giving back that control to the merchants, to the shoppers, and of course the developers in between, given the rich history of kind of where we've come from to make that possible and give every possible option to make that work, but it really comes down to cost, it comes down to expectations, and we've got a really, I think a really compelling set of capabilities that help really a lot of those situations that I think a lot of people have heard of and are familiar with. But as I've gotten to know it more. I think there's a lot of aspects of this, especially some of our new products, that people have not, like, don't even realize that they're there that can help their business. I'm excited to be here, and I think there's a lot of upside for.
Ben Marks [00:25:53]:
So, incidentally, stacking mannequins was the name of my college band.
Eric Erway [00:25:57]:
It's hot.
Ben Marks [00:25:58]:
Stacking mannequins. Stacking mannequins. I'm pretty sure I would not have had that on any bingo card. So I guess that brings up another point, right? Because part of the job, and I mean, I think you have this kind of, sort of, your customer market curation is even informing or making businesses aware of the tools and the best practices and everything. And I guess in your world, it's maybe not quite as quite as dense or obfuscated as payments, but yeah, the ins and outs, I mean, people just know, okay, hey, I throw this data at, you know, at Ups's endpoint, and I'm going to get back some. Some kind of shipping cost based on either dim weight, so it's a dimensional calculation and then also weight calculation, and I'm ignoring RTL and the bigger and more complicated things. And then I think beyond that, there's also, at the business to business level, there's buy rates, there's sort of the preferred rates that you might be able to offer as a platform. Like, do you all have resources that help people understand this, just, you know, just in general, or do you have resources that you recommend to help merchants educate themselves about this?
Eric Erway [00:27:23]:
Yeah, so I think, you know, I would say strictly from a product standpoint, I think the key to a lot of this has been something that the team has been working on for a long time, well before I started, which is around our analytics. And so this idea where and this capability was just launched for our high level plans advanced in enterprise in the past week or two, but this idea of saying, okay, this is great. And by the way, the tax reference, very similar, had the same observation, because we've almost oversimplified all the things that are happening to get you that rate. On the shipping side, it's very much the same. But in the end, you as a merchant are probably spending more than you want, maybe even overspending on what shipping looks like, and you don't understand why, and you want to make changes to that. Some merchants want to use that as a way to increase revenue. So you can look at shipping as a profit center in some cases, and some people are just learning what that means. And so there's a lot of what we do a lot of because we're so invested in the community.
Eric Erway [00:28:20]:
Again, all platforms for that matter, just educating people. What that is, the mannequin example is perfect because it's a little extreme. It's a little bit, but it's memorable. And so I still remember that talk. I think we did that New York even a couple months before that. But you see the problems that we're solving for and whether it's these types of problems or going back to, again, watching some poor person use a subway card machine with six or seven stickies on that and go, we can help with that. But a lot of it is, where can we help the most for that one? We have a lot of resources for that, but I think as an industry, I think there's a lot that goes behind there that I think we can continue to educate people around that, whether it's our site, our industry. I think there's a lot of uniqueness that we're doing, though.
Eric Erway [00:29:03]:
That is more than just a rate, but yeah, we have some. I think it's. But I think we can even do more, for sure because we uniquely sit between those carriers and the platforms. That's why we're quite honest. That's why we're as active in the community as we are. Because I think it's a very, and I think helping merchants understand what they can do more with shipping around that I think is super important for them as they get to understand it.
Ben Marks [00:29:24]:
What's the thing that you would want people to know? Uh, more if you, if you even have a thing that you would, you wish customers would know or understand better when they, when they, you know, in order to work. Work the best with you all or have the right expectations.
Eric Erway [00:29:39]:
Yeah, I think, I think people know us and the data will show up. People, people know us primarily from the days of the, of the matrix work that we've done. So really getting accurate rates, optimizing those. And the data will show things like dimensional packing and delivery date and time being like what people know us for the most. But the reality is there's a lot of really, there, there are things that we solve for that. I think once you get beyond that, I think that are really useful. And so I think primarily, obviously, buy them on pickup in store as an interesting, as part of kind of our enhanced checkout suite. I think so I think that's there.
Eric Erway [00:30:11]:
That's available if you use it now, but then also things like carrier backup rates. Right. And so this idea, especially going into peak, maybe there's an issue with the carrier, you don't want to lose that sale. And so we have, there's an inherent, because we are neutral to the carriers as well as the platforms, there's a resiliency to like adding a backup carrier for that that I think people don't really aren't really aware of that I would want as a merchant, just in case something, something doesn't work out, that it falls back and rolls over to another carrier, another method, what have you. And so there's a lot of little things like that. That situation I think will help. I think our advanced and enterprise customers start to get that more. And I think we've got a really greater story to tell around analytics.
Eric Erway [00:30:49]:
Not just, we're not just doing AI and ML, we're solving problems and in some cases actually pushing this concept of, and we're just talking about this, this week, like return on shipping spend. Like we talked, Roas has been around, people talk about it a lot, but like this idea of like what does it mean for return on shipping spend, has anybody looked at that, talked about that and started that?
Ben Marks [00:31:08]:
I've seen Ros, I haven't seen Ross.
Eric Erway [00:31:10]:
You haven't seen Ros. And so, yeah, but like it's really important. It's such a, like everybody you talk to is, oh my gosh, I spent so much on shipping. You do? Let's like, so I think our products will help with that. And what I like about it, it's attached to a problem that merchants face every day. It's not necessarily a solution. Like, hey, we've got this AI and ML thing. Like the problem is spent, the problem is optimizing that.
Eric Erway [00:31:31]:
And, but yeah, I think that's the big thing that we're working towards. But there's a lot of little things. I think if you look at the various features that people don't, I think people don't kind of see beyond the first. And so we've got trials and such out there to encourage people to give that a shot, which is, which is good. So, yeah, that's, sorry, longer answer than probably not, but I think I felt the same way when I joined. There's more than meets the eye, as they would say now.
Ben Marks [00:31:56]:
Okay, well, yes, I think you probably could do tons of work educating and still people just not going. There's just a lot involved. On that note, any interesting things coming out? I mean, you mentioned because we kind of have to AIML, I would assume the ML part is actually really big for you all. And you all are talking with endpoints and vendors who for sure, for damn sure are very big and probably have huge data lakes and tons of analytics on that. Any, any interesting things on the horizon that you can, that you can share?
Eric Erway [00:32:43]:
Yeah, for sure. So I think one of the biggest benefits of Shipperhq, where again, you know, if you look at a face value, and especially if you're not familiar with them in the ecosystem, oh, there are startups, we're not a startup. It's, you know, we've got 16 years of experience, but we also have 16 years of data. So traditionally, when you look at like an ML problems to solve for like, good data is off. Like you, you can't just make that up, you have it. So we have good data as kind of guardians and servants of that, that I think we can see and help not only in our product development, but as we start to introduce new capabilities in addition to what we've done on analytics that start to get really interesting. So yeah, we've been very vocal about our, I think our investment into analytics. We've got some really exciting things happening later this year on a b testing.
Eric Erway [00:33:27]:
So this idea where you might want to test free shipping, you might want to test maybe let's say like a delivery surcharge or specific set for specific percentage, which is incredibly important for larger customers that don't just want to flip a switch and see what happens. So we're interested in doing some experimentation later this year based on the analytics that we've done that I think we're really excited about, and so we're working towards that. I will say, I think beyond all of that, I still think some of the best work that's done, that can be done, that we will be doing, is really around the insights and recommendations. This idea where the experience of our product is less so than pages and pages and pages of dashboards, that's really starting to get intelligent on making that recommendation, Ben, and we're starting to see an anomaly here and there. We've made this recommendation, this is what we can do about it. And so I think that's where we start to win for the merchants versus giving them another set of tasks, another tool, another, another thing to work there. That's where we're going and kind of a short form, but we've got some things happening.
Ben Marks [00:34:33]:
I can see the hands off scalable, but sort of virtually attended curation recommendation. I mean, you all, after all, are just another partner in merchants solutions for this interesting product domain. Um, well, I think we're coming up on that time. Are you, you going out to any, any events this year?
Eric Erway [00:34:59]:
You know, it always, always remains to be open. You know, we did a couple events earlier this year. I'm eyeing New York in October. I think a lot of them start to pick up at the beginning of the year. Some of the bigger trade trade ones, your nrfs and chat talks and things like that. So I think those are very much in play. And we've had a couple in Austin, right? We've got a, we've got, we've got summit with another platform in a week or so as well. But we're everywhere, right? And I think we kind of embraced that neutrality because I think we have shared problems and an ecosystem merchants to solve them for.
Eric Erway [00:35:33]:
But yeah, we're always out there though and I think. But myself, yeah, it's just a handful here as we round out the year, but you never know. We do join and create some small, tons of smaller ones we've created over the past couple, couple of weeks as well.
Ben Marks [00:35:48]:
Well, don't forget about Shopware's shoptoberfest in New York on the 17 September.
Eric Erway [00:35:55]:
Well, you know, that's something to consider. I mean I'm a friend of anything, any fest, any fest as you know. And so if there's a shoptoberfest then this sounds like a cordial invite. And so I may, I'll have my people talk.
Ben Marks [00:36:09]:
I will 100% be there in some later hosenous so. And not, and not.
Eric Erway [00:36:13]:
I know you will.
Ben Marks [00:36:14]:
Not the cheap ones.
Eric Erway [00:36:14]:
People would kid about that, but you won't.
Ben Marks [00:36:15]:
Not the cheap ones. Good ones for sure. Okay, my friend. Well, I hope you, if you would give my best to the whole team there. It's a great crew there in Austin and around. Really, really great to catch up with you, Eric. It was nice running into you in London earlier this year. I look forward to seeing you again.
Ben Marks [00:36:32]:
Thanks. Thanks again for spending some time with me and for your insights.
Eric Erway [00:36:35]:
Awesome. Hey, thank you so much again for having me. Bentley, take care.