Founded in 2013, Prospectors Dream is a sibling-owned business created by David Peterson and Tim Peterson in Northwestern Montana. David began gold prospecting as a hobby after his uncle introduced it to him. However, after his first prospecting trip, David soon realized how time consuming the process of sluicing for gold was, especially given how little the return was. Being a mechanical designer, an idea struck David: why not create a better sluicing tool that’ll save them time and their backs? With the help of his uncle and friends, David went through trials and errors as well as tons of patent research to develop an effective sluicing tool, the Dream Mat.
Once Tim and David began selling the Dream Mat, their business started to grow steadily within a year, which inspired Tim to create a manufacturing facility for the Dream Mat. He decided to leave his full-time job to solely focus on the business with David following in his footsteps soon after. The two believe in “More Gold = More Fun!” and that their products are disrupting the prospecting industry. Prospectors Dream’s goal is to build a product that’ll allow anyone in the gold community to have fun while working less.
The Challenge:
Once Prospectors Dream gained some traction, they quickly realized that their process of packaging and shipping were extremely time consuming. They not only had to go onto their shipping carrier’s website, which was non-intuitive and hard to use, but also manually copy and paste the orders from the website to the package. Afterwards, they had to handwrite the packing slips for each order, leaving them more susceptible to human errors. This whole process would last for hours and go late into the night, but the work didn’t stop there. Once they shipped a package the following day, they would have to log back into the carrier’s website, collect the tracking information, and individually email the details to their customers.
In addition to an inefficient shipping workflow, David and Tim were faced with high shipping rates from the carriers they used. As a result of having to pass on those costs, they were flooded with customer emails asking why the price of their shipping was so high. “I couldn’t converse with every customer to explain the shipping process. It would eat too much of my time,” explained David.
After seeing his brother struggle with the shipment challenges and customer support emails, Tim told him, “We have to do something about it because you can’t keep up. This isn’t going to work. There’s got to be an app out there that allows us to see shipping rates from different carriers all in one place, gets us the best prices, and prints us packing slips, too!”
Prospectors Dream needed a better way to streamline their workflow and find cheaper shipping prices in order to optimize time and increase customer satisfaction.
The Solution:
After conducting some research, Tim turned to Shippo to seamlessly solve all of Prospectors Dream’s troubles by integrating their Shopify and Amazon stores with the robust shipping solution, and providing access to discounted shipping rates and printable packing slips.
With Shippo’s 30-day free trial offer, Tim was able to get started on Shippo with the Pro Plan – an upgrade from Shippo’s free Starter plan – easily and at no initial cost. “It was so easy to start. It was like ‘Wow, I’m already shipping stuff with Shippo!’ It was so fast and there was no long learning curve,” said Tim. An easy-to-use app plus the ability to ship right away were extremely important to him and David since they were only a two-man team and a large chunk of their time had already been spent doing everything manually.
David and Tim enjoyed being able to effortlessly integrate their Shopify and Amazon stores with Shippo. All their orders became centralized in one place and were auto-populated right into their Shippo dashboard with all the correct shipping information. David shared, “[The centralization of orders] has helped us cut down on all our mistakes by having the orders all together.” This has also saved them a large amount of time from having to manually copy and paste orders from their stores into a carrier website.
Being able to print out packing slips through Shippo was also a huge bonus for David and Tim. Rather than having to handwrite packing slips for every single order, they were able to print a packing slip for each order with just a click of a button. As a result, they cut down on unintentional errors and now more accurately fulfill every shipment.
Lastly, Prospectors Dream really values helping their customers save money on shipping. It was critical for them to access better shipping rates. “We’re always proactive about giving the customer the best price. We want to roll savings over to our customers,” shared David. With Shippo’s discounted rates, Prospectors Dream is able to save costs for both themselves and their customers.
The Results:
With Shippo, Prospectors Dream has optimized their workflow, cut down costs for their business and their customers, reduced customer inquiries and support costs, and scaled their business fivefold from when they first started. “We know a large part of someone’s decision in purchasing is their shipping experience. The low shipping rates on Shippo can help inspire that sale because we aren’t packing an additional 15% or 20% for shipping onto the product cost,” shared Tim.
Tim and David were alleviated once they no longer needed to allocate several, consecutive hours every day to ship out orders. Their optimized workflow now enables them to fulfill shipments much faster and at any time of the day. “Shipping no longer feels dreadful,” said David. “With Shippo, shipping is now easier and more fun than any of our other in-house tasks.” Also, with this improvement, only Tim has to fulfill shipments, which allows David to focus on other pressing tasks.
By saving plenty of time on shipping, David has been able to spend more time with his kids and invest time into other avenues of the business, such as Prospectors Dream’s new commercial (that features Bigfoot!). As Prospectors Dream continues to grow, they know they can rely on Shippo to save them time and money on their shipping process.
A Shipping Solution for Businesses of All Sizes
Shippo is a single, easy-to-integrate program that powers everything leading e-commerce brands need for shipping. From a single integration, businesses gain access to over 85+ global shipping carriers. And since all carrier interactions are standardized, Shippo makes it easy for businesses to compare rates and ETAs, print labels, schedule pickups (with USPS and DHL Express), track shipments, facilitate returns, and more across several carriers, all in one place.
Connecting your online store is also fast and easy with Shippo’s pre-built integrations. Shippo can automatically connect with several popular e-commerce platforms and marketplaces, and getting set up can be done in a manner of minutes without the need for any technical developer resources.
You also have options for using Shippo: online through our web application or connected via API. The great thing about these options is that Shippo has the ability to grow with you as your business needs evolve.
For businesses that want to get started right away, the web app is a great solution. And getting started is as easy as opening an account, entering some basic information, and creating your first shipping label. For businesses looking for an even more customizable solution, Shippo’s API is the next step. With Shippo’s developer-centric API, businesses can take their automation efforts even further. Visit Shippo’s API information page to learn more.