Introducing: Shipping for Marketplaces Whitepaper
Building an e-commerce marketplace is more complex than typical retail since you’ve got to build up both the seller and buyer sides. When I talk to marketplace founders, their focus is often on the pre-sales experience: how to encourage sellers to list their products on the marketplace and how to get buyers to purchase those products. However, what happens after the sale is just as important.
Shipping is one of those unsexy, not-often-talked-about areas that is critical to a marketplace’s chance of success. It’s the one physical link between the seller and buyer. If you look at eBay, Amazon, and Etsy, they all have heavily invested in the post-sales experience by controlling shipping. But, it’s not as easy for a smaller, early-stage marketplace to create the same level of control and post-sales experience as Amazon.
This is why I’m very excited to announce Shippo’s new whitepaper on Shipping for Marketplaces.
Shippo powers shipping for thousands of marketplaces and sellers, and they are sharing some key knowledge, insight, and examples of how marketplaces can leverage shipping as a data layer across business operations.
The whitepaper covers all aspects of the pre-sales and post-sales process, including: how shipping can help increase sales, how to improve both customer and seller experiences with shipping, how to smooth out customer support, and how to manage fraud prevention/issues. It’s packed with in-depth, real-world examples that are incredibly useful.
Shipping for Marketplaces is a great resource for any marketplace start-up that has found product-market fit, but is looking for a way to tighten up operations and control the experience for both sellers and buyers.
Boris Wertz is the founding partner of Version One. Before becoming an investor, Boris was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com which sold to Amazon in 2008. He was responsible for marketing, business development, product, customer service and international operations – leading a team of 60 people. This deep operational experience helps him guide other entrepreneurs to start, build and scale companies.
Shippo is a multi-carrier API and web app that helps retailers, marketplaces and platforms connect to a global network of carriers. Businesses use Shippo to get real-time rates, print labels, automate international paperwork, track packages and facilitate returns. Shippo provides the tools to help businesses succeed through shipping.
