Sweetwater’s Gear Exchange marketplace cut shipping support tickets by 80% and freed engineers to build seller-first features with Shippo's shipping API.
Sign Up Free
Sweetwater, one of the largest musical instrument retailers in the U.S., launched Gear Exchange to give musicians a trusted, community-driven way to buy and sell used gear. But delivering on that trust meant owning the entire post-purchase experience—especially shipping.
Challenge
As Gear Exchange grew, shipping became a consistent point of friction for sellers, buyers, and internal teams. The platform offered no built-in logistics: sellers had to source their own labels, manually input tracking numbers, and navigate insurance claims directly with carriers.
“We didn’t offer shipping labels at all,” said Zach Bloom, Operations Manager at Gear Exchange. “Customers had to go to the carriers and ship it themselves. But if something got damaged in transit, they looked to us to make it right.”
Customer support teams were overwhelmed by shipping-related tickets, most of which stemmed from claims being denied. To preserve customer relationships, Sweetwater often absorbed the losses themselves.
Meanwhile, the product and engineering teams faced an expensive tradeoff: spend resources to build and maintain shipping tools, or invest in core features that would actually grow the marketplace. Without a reliable shipping layer, they kept getting pulled into shipping infrastructure work.
To scale Gear Exchange and deliver the kind of seller experience their customers expected, Sweetwater needed a reliable shipping solution that felt seamless to sellers, was invisible to buyers, and fully offloaded the work from the engineering team.
Solution
Instead of building their own logistics stack, Sweetwater integrated Shippo’s shipping API. The setup was fast and lightweight, enabling their team to quickly launch a complete shipping experience without heavy dev work. Shippo API powered:
- Multi-carrier label generation (FedEx, UPS, USPS)
- Real-time tracking and automated notifications for buyers and sellers
- Built-in shipping insurance powered by XCover, with a drastically better claims process
- Discounted rates via Sweetwater’s own carrier accounts
“Shipping is now a solved problem. We’re glad we didn’t spend our time rebuilding something Shippo already figured out.”
— Chrissy Pearl, Director of Ecommerce
Results
80% reduction in shipping-related support tickets with integrated insurance
Before Shippo, Sweetwater’s customer support team was regularly pulled into shipping issues, from missing tracking numbers to denied damage claims, often absorbing those costs.
With Shippo and integrated insurance via XCover, claims are now handled directly by sellers through a streamlined process.
Sweetwater’s support team can now focus on what actually grows the marketplace—onboarding sellers, improving experience, and resolving the rare edge cases that truly require their time.
“Shipping damage used to be a nightmare. Now we’re seeing 80% fewer tickets—just one or two a week, compared to over 10 before.”
— Zach Bloom, Operations Manager
.png)
Engineering unblocked to build musician-first features
By offloading all shipping infrastructure to Shippo, Sweetwater freed up its engineering team to deliver seller-focused innovations—like multi-box label flows for complex shipments (e.g. drum kits) and a pre-listing shipping cost estimator powered by Shippo’s rating tools. It’s features like these that make Gear Exchange feel truly tailored to musicians.
“Shipping is no longer a part of our business that I have to think much about. We let Shippo handle the shipping part that they're good at, so now we can solve the other problems that are unique to our customer base and unique to our business.”
— Chrissy Pearl, Director of Ecommerce
Ready to get started?