ShipHawk
Automating Cart-to-Customer Processes

Online shopping is changing. Gone are the days when consumers purchased only small items that could be sent efficiently via parcel post. Today, consumers have demonstrated that they are willing to buy both larger and higher value items online, ranging from precious jewelry and designer clothing to appliances and even furniture. Since shipping is the second-highest cost for retailers, after the cost of the goods themselves, this expansion has forced retailers to create successful shipping strategies in order to remain competitive. “Retailers can’t afford to treat shipping as an afterthought—its impact to both the income statement and the customer experience is too important to ignore,” says Jeremy Bodenhamer, CEO and Co- Founder of ShipHawk. Today, the company is fueling growth in the e-commerce sector by automating shipping, logistics, and distribution processes through technology. The company helps solve these issues with a cart-to-customer technology platform that provides real-time price points in the shopping cart from a marketplace of carriers, automates backend processes including optimal packaging selection, and gives retailers and their customers full visibility along the way. By using ShipHawk, retailers can optimize their pricing decisions for each individual transaction, maintaining the highest possible margins, while building trust with customers. Although the company started as a platform to facilitate on-demand shipping of large or irregular items by individuals and small businesses, as e-commerce has evolved, so has the company. ShipHawk now provides enterprise-level solutions that can support the world’s largest omni-channel retailers.

ShipHawk’s main offering is the ShipHawk Platform, which gives e-commerce firms access to the best shipping rates per order at the point-of-sale—across carriers and 3PLs—regardless of the type of item or service requirements. Retailers can share these rates directly within the shopping cart, or apply retailer business policies (such as free shipping) with simple logic. The platform is accessible via API, e-commerce platform extensions, as well as through a dashboard interface. The platform helps grow margins via the ShipHawk marketplace of carriers, increase conversion at point-of-sale, reduce logistics costs with automation from order through delivery and improve the customer experience with a transparent shipping process.

Our customers are the lifeblood of our product roadmap and ensure that we are spending our energy on real-life challenges

The core of the ShipHawk platform is an intelligence engine that powers optimal shipping results and gives access to a broad and diverse carrier marketplace services. “We source real-time rates from a growing network of carriers—3PL, white glove, blanket wrap, on-demand, freight, and parcel to offer options to retailers,” adds Bodenhamer. Another feature of the platform is the ShipHawk dashboard, which seamlessly connects disparate systems. It lets retailers and customers know where any given item is at any point in time on its delivery path, something that’s typically only available through the largest parcel shippers like UPS and FedEx. The dashboard also enables mobile or desktop notifications to be sent automatically to customers.

Recently, ShipHawk helped Everything But the House (EBTH), an on-line estate sale company, automate its entire process from order through delivery. With ShipHawk, EBTH increased confidence in its shipping quotes, and could put quotes directly within the cart at the point-of-bidding/ sale. ShipHawk helped EBTH reduce the amount of time spent collecting quotes, and because of the increased transparency, bids on its items went up, as did the overall average winning bid price.

Bodenhamer and his team work closely with customers, jointly developing and piloting new ideas with them. “Our customers are the lifeblood of our product roadmap and ensure that we are spending our energy on real-life challenges,” asserts Bodenhamer. ShipHawk’s goal is to be the shipping intelligence layer for the world’s largest omni-channel retailers. “Beyond logistics automation and a seamless end-to-end experience for retailers, we see a world where we can give our clients unique information to continue optimizing for profitability,” concludes Bodenhamer.