Based in San Francisco and founded in 1991, Mann has helped thousands of small businesses throughout the United States with their IT and technology needs. From securing your company's devices from potential hackers and threats, to ensuring your internet connection stays up during outages, Mann has offered honest, reliable, and certified help from the beginning. But while the business has been around since the early 90s, its shipping service offering is a relatively new part of its business born out of necessity.
“We went through a massive overhaul during COVID. Prior to that, we were onsite in client’s offices, taking computers off the shelf, and configuring them before our client’s employees would start. After COVID hit, many of our clients shut down their offices and never reopened their offices. From the ground up we’ve had to build (our shipping offering) and we’ve been using Shippo for a year and a half.”
Helping their clients, who switched from an in-office to a remote work environment, ship laptops back and forth to onboarding and departing employees has since become a staple offering.
In order to future-proof and maintain control of their shipping operations, Mann developed their own in-house dashboards and software solutions. But, as their shipping service began to scale, relying on manual label generation processes quickly became an obstacle.
The Challenge:
Mann has always been a business that has prided itself on customer satisfaction. So, with a new service offering and a fulfillment team of just two people, speed and efficiency are paramount to maintaining that standard. But, as the service started to gain popularity, it wasn’t long before the bottlenecks would present themselves.
“We were having to go to FedEx’s website and individually create every single label. As volume increased from 4 labels a day to 40 labels a day, if we had to continue manually creating every single label it just would not have worked.”
Thus, the search began for a faster way to generate, purchase, and print shipping labels. However, while fulfilling shipment requests was becoming a challenge, there was also another challenge that arose when looking for a solution.
Mann has an exclusive account with FedEx and needed to make sure they had a way to access their own negotiated shipping rates. On top of that, they needed an API provider that would integrate with their own in-house software solution. Or as the Mann team put it:
“We need a platform that integrates with our existing system which is fully customized. We want to be able to just plug in a vendor into our systems and continue working the way we do.”
Enter Shippo.
The Solution:
After scouring the web looking for a tool that met their technical criteria they also wanted to ensure other overarching business goals weren’t lost in their search.
“#1 is about the customer satisfaction. It's about being able to rise to the occasion when our clients need that critical overnight shipment. We also measure our own internal processes. We want our team members to feel good about what they’re doing and how they’re doing. So it’s all about balancing that fine line and having a tool that serves that purpose well.”
After taking a little time to sell the solution internally and ensure integrations were properly set up, Mann was finally able to strike that balance.
By streamlining their internal processes, they can now compare FedEx rates from their own account within their own dashboard while taking advantage of the features found in Shippo’s Label generation and Rating API. Choosing between services such as FedEx Ground Economy and FedEx Home Delivery was now faster than ever and with Shippo’s Addresses API, they could also select previously used addresses and save addresses for future references more efficiently than ever.
The Result:
With such a small fulfillment team and thousands of computers shipped since COVID, time is of the essence. With their newfound solution, they were able to win that time back and then some.
“With the addition of Shippo, we’ve been able to make it to a point where for certain items that we ship it takes us less than five minutes, including packing the box.”
But, speed hasn’t been the only positive result Mann has seen since integrating with Shippo.
“By having Shippo it was primarily an improvement for our process internally. We didn’t like what we were currently having to do so we looked for a better option. By freeing up the team members who were previously doing the work, we’re able to do more of the customer satisfaction side of things such as improving our communications and streamlining our ability to meet that criteria. It also allows us to handle same-day requests because we’re not spending so much time trying to get those necessary processes done.”
Shippo has also been more than a one-time integration for Mann.
“We are still continuing on almost a weekly basis to add more functionality primarily from our side that leverages Shippo very heavily to make our job easier and that wouldn’t be possible without that kind of foundation.”
A Shipping Solution for Businesses of All Sizes
Shippo stands out as an industry-leading shipping software company, offering a robust API solution tailored for large-volume e-commerce businesses, 3PLs, online marketplaces, and online selling platforms. Designed on a contemporary tech stack using the latest code, our API functionalities are trusted by industry giants like hims, Ryder, and ShipBob. What sets Shippo apart is its flexibility, seamless integration into your existing tech stack, and its ability to serve those within and outside the world of e-commerce and logistics.
Shippo’s API architecture empowers your business with pre-purchase features, enabling actions such as rate shopping across multiple carriers, displaying rates at checkout, and ensuring accurate package delivery through address validation. Core shipping services like effortless label generation, manifests, and package pickups are readily available. Post-purchase, our API ensures end-to-end shipment tracking and facilitates hassle-free returns through return labels. Access to 40+ carrier accounts, scalable technology, and enterprise-ready security, including 24/7 monitoring and SOC2 Type 2 audits, provide a reliable foundation.
Moreover, our API can be swiftly integrated, allowing your business to align with its goals in a timely and cost-effective manner. To delve deeper into the possibilities, reach out to our API experts today.