About the Author
Richard Lee is the co-founder of Hyprcarry.
Hyprcarry is a streetwear brand that has had a focus on the gaming influencers’ space. They provide an end-to-end solution for influencers to get excellent custom merchandise in the hands of their fans. With HYPR CARRY, there is always an extra eye on detail to ensure everyone involved has the best product possible.
Key Metrics:
- Average shipping time: 10 days
- Main shipping destinations: US, CA, GB, AU
- Response time: within 1 hour
- Order amount: 15,000+ orders
Large Orders Come at Any Point
Hyprcarry works with some high-profile clients who love to make limited sales based on milestones. Just like Nike honors Kobe Bryant’s 81-points game with limited edition-sneakers, Hyprcarry’s clients love to sell limited products to celebrate their milestones. Like reaching a certain number of subscribers, launching a new season of video games, or a new concert tour. These influencers are based in the digital space, which means fans come in all shapes and sizes worldwide. Providing worldwide shipping at reasonable prices was paramount to ensure we could provide for everyone.
Our clients’ career milestones (generally based on followers or subscribers) can come at any point, so are very unpredictable. When setting up the stores based on these milestones, we also need to consider the fan bases are extremely enthusiastic and are likely to sell large volumes. It’s very normal that one of our clients launch a pop-up store for their 6 million subscriber milestone and sell 14 thousand limited T-shirts and hoodies in a couple of days. It’s very important for us to process those orders within 2 days as we guaranteed in our shipping policy.
The Burning Issues
Based on the above situation, Hyprcarry has been faced with a series of problems in order fulfillment. And as our business grows, they become burning issues.
How do we ensure we have a solution that can work intermittently all year round?
Unlike other eCommerce businesses, order amount of Hyprcarry is not stable, they will peak in a short time. And the time and quantity of the next wave of orders are unpredictable. It’s like going through Christmas seasons that happen from time to time throughout the year.
How do we provide a cost-effective solution?
We need to delight the fans and reserve a certain profit margin for our clients at the same time. Offering free shipping with restrictions is a good way to promote, we don’t want clients to give it up because of shipping costs.
How do we ship worldwide?
The buyers are from all over the world and our suppliers are in China. As a startup business, we don’t have the time and energy to contact multiple shipping companies and negotiate with them just to get the best rate and more shipping destinations.
How do we provide customers with tracking information and updates?
We provide tracking advice to clients once their orders are dispatched, so it’s important to get clear guidance from the fulfillment partner.
We looked at multiple solutions:
- Building out our own warehousing
- Sending from our office located in Australia
- Working with a 3PL partner
Building out warehousing for intermittent experiences was not a cost viable solution, especially for a startup.
Sending things directly from Australia means factory in China needs to send to Australia, which is extremely time inefficient, along with Australia’s insane international shipping costs.
Working with a 3PL partner was the most logical conclusion, which opened a new round of concerns namely being: how and who?
A Group of Fulfillment Experts Being Ready to Help
After exploring multiple options we stumbled upon NextSmartShip who ended up offering everything that we needed and quickly ticked off the boxes, while relieving our concerns of working with 3PL out of China.
I worked initially with Lillian and then a group was created with Jenny and Alex to be behind everything. The chat is active and they are constantly responding to any queries I have. They have their own Order Management System which provides a way to integrate our different Shopify stores in directly. This can be a little confusing to navigate and has some issues around translation this was mitigated by the active chat with Lilian or Jenny ready to help.
“I think the team looks after us really well and provides an extremely good service. We are in constant communication and they answer all questions as best they can quickly.”
— Richard Lee
The Global Fulfillment Network
NextSmartShip offers a range of shipping options to all the major countries we needed to send to, this allows us to work with our clients and choose the option that fits best. The quotation Lilian sent to me is very clear, including multiple shipping options for each destination, so we can choose based on the time and price needs.
For other countries, NextSmartShip has gone out of their way to find other solutions and provided them. Lillian/Jenny helped with ensuring all the products arrived in the warehouse and were shelved to send going as far as to liaise with our warehouse. After products were sent the team helped me upload the tracking using the OMS removing a lot of manual labour and making everything seamless.
Overall, the service is the biggest standout for NextSmartShip, they have helped us achieve all our goals. They went above and beyond for all hurdles met. They have made logistics with high volumes of units out of China seamless.
What’s Next
The last batch of 15 thousand orders are fulfilled smoothly, customers have received goods and clients have managed to get more profit from the overall experience. Since NextSmartShip has solved most of the problems for us, we are ready to provide better service to the worldwide clients this holiday season.
