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.