Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we revisit the episode with Travis Mariea, CEO of flxpoint.com, where we talked about ways to automate and optimize your dropshipping marketplace and fulfillment operations. So let's dive right into it.
Voice over [00:00:16]:
This is the e commerce Coffee Break, a top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome.
Claus Lauter [00:00:41]:
Welcome to the hello and welcome to another episode of the infamous Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to talk about dropshipping. Dropshipping has been declared dead a million times, but it is not with me on the show today I have Travis Mariet. He is the CEO of flxpoint.com, a dropship and distributed order management platform built for connected commerce. Travis has been in the e commerce industry for over ten years, leading marketing, multiple software and service companies. He is an advocate of the distribution fulfillment model and passionate about empowering merchants to compete in a rapidly evolving retail industry. So let's dive into the topic of dropshipping. Hey Travis, how are you today?
Travis Mariea [00:01:16]:
Hey, good. Thanks for having me.
Claus Lauter [00:01:18]:
Great to have you on the show. Travis. Dropshipping, why?
Travis Mariea [00:01:21]:
Travis? One it's an amazing fulfillment model. There's been a lot of different approaches to it as far as there's China, the US, there's the internal us based approach. There's a lot of different ideas about it out there. I think, you know, the big thing to think about when it comes to drop ship is it sounds so great at the surface because there is a lot of efficiencies in the actual model if it's done right. You know, in general, it's been tough to get it going because there's a lot of integration heavy kind of work that is involved. But in general, right now, dropshipping is really picking back up. And I'm not talking about start a side job, quit your nine to five kind of that the drop shipping, where it's this live on an island kind of scenario. We deal mostly in drop shipping where it's a fulfillment model for an established retailer or someone that has an audience in general, maybe not a retailer, but an influencer, whatever it might be, but has an audience, has a differentiated kind of brand for that type of company.
Travis Mariea [00:02:20]:
It can make a ton of sense. And you know, right now it's some of the best time to start drop shipping. You've got direct to consumer brands that are great, that have their own Shopify store on a bigcommerce store, wherever it might be, that you can easily plug in with systems like whether it's zapier or like an order management system built for drop ship like ourselves, Flexpoint, whatever it might be, you can easily connect to a partner network of dropshippers. And so right now, it's really been interesting to see the new players getting into the space because it doesn't require as much technical overhead as it has in the past. So it's been interesting to kind of see that.
Claus Lauter [00:02:56]:
Yeah, thanks for clarifying. We're not talking about what was a hype a few years ago. The Cumbridge overnight with Aliexpress, dropshipping, these things and this kind of dropshipping is definitely nothing that I would recommend. But dropshipping as a business model has been around for a very long, very long time. And I agree 100% with you. Moving the market, moving to DTC, dropshipping done the right way, and we will dive into this now is still a great business concept. Now it can become relatively complex. If you're running a store, you have different suppliers, different technology platforms, and I understand you at Flexpoint, you're helping in basically clearing this up, create clarity and helping with the processes.
Claus Lauter [00:03:35]:
Tell me a little bit about the complexities behind running a dropshipping business.
Travis Mariea [00:03:40]:
Sure. Yeah. Let's say you're typically just shipping something out of your warehouse. You're a DDC brand or a traditional retailer that you've had a brick and mortar or your own warehouse. You're used to physically having these items, and maybe just a small catalog because you're not building out a large catalog. It's usually price prohibitive to do that. But when you start drop shipping, a lot of times you're dealing with a larger catalog because you can, because you don't have to own the inventory and you don't actually own it. So you don't physically have it.
Travis Mariea [00:04:07]:
So that means things like images, titles, descriptions, like how do you actually decide what to call it, how to describe it, how to get the imagery, just getting the products up onto your website en masse, usually, like I said, it's more just one or two that you're adding. At least in our model, the traditional retail model can be difficult. So you're dealing with whether it's a file or an integration need there and getting it up, categorizing it properly. So to start, that's a piece of it. Once you get your product catalog onto your website, you then need to sync inventory. So you're working with your vendors to understand where do they maintain their accurate quantities. So you don't sell something they don't have in their warehouse that they cannot ship for you. So as I was saying earlier, you need to build a good brand.
Travis Mariea [00:04:48]:
It's not aliexpress just flipping customers, never having them come back. You need to be still building a good brand. And with that, you need to have a good fulfillment experience. And so with that, you gotta make sure that you're not selling things that are out of stock when you're fulfilling orders, when people buy them on your website. To build your brand, onboarding vendors in general, it's something that you should be thinking about. And you need systems like whether it's a flexboard or any kind of software out there that helps you kind of onboard these vendors to get the catalog in, to sync the inventory, to manage how many vendors you have in a queue, how many that you've already signed agreements with, um, how many that you've integrated with. So just that whole piece of it, that's, that's all just getting started, right? There's some complexity there and why there's software out there that focuses just on that piece. And so once you get going, that's, you get your vendors up, you're going, you start getting orders in, you do need to be thinking about, okay, an order comes in, it has one of my branded items on it, and it also has a drop ship item on it.
Travis Mariea [00:05:45]:
You know, how do I split that off appropriately? And then how do I, you know, make sure that experience is good, whether it's coming in two boxes or whether you're bringing it into your own warehouse first, what we call cross stocking and bringing that in first and then sending it all together. If you have high enough margins, it can make sense to do that in some industries. So it's thinking about those complexities and how you want to handle them. And one of the most complex areas that we handle is in the retail world where you might already be buying wholesale from brands. Say I'm an outdoors company and, you know, I sell fishing rods and im currently buying those wholesale. Im storing my whole warehouse and im sending them out. If Im also dropping that exact same fishing rod, how do I map that across multiple systems and say, this fishing rods in my warehouse, this ones also in another warehouse, how do I get that up to my site as one product listing with an accurate quantity across those two separate warehouses and one I dont own? Right, its a dropshipper and when an order comes in, sure, maybe its as simple enough as saying I just want to always fulfill my warehouse and then if its out of stock, go over to the dropshipper and fulfill it there. But we have clients that say, you know what, no, if its in California, fulfill it directly from the dropshipper because I cant fulfill it for the same cost.
Travis Mariea [00:06:59]:
Right. Or I cant get there quick enough time or if its international. So theres all those complexities where systems like flxpoint kind of come in and what we call product overlap, where you have the exact same product in multiple warehouses, third party and first party. So it's really just a game of data integration, data management, whether it's inventory, product, or order data.
Claus Lauter [00:07:19]:
It was a great overview of what basically dropshipping, the different kinds of scenarios that you can work with. I like that. So now once you have found a vendor or supplier for the products that you want to sell in your store, obviously they all have different technology platforms. Tell me a little bit about the integration of whatever they can provide when it comes to the data exchange to your platform. That might be shopify, that might be big commerce wherever you're on.
Travis Mariea [00:07:46]:
Yeah, yeah exactly. So it's all about integration, right? And that's, that's the main piece when you're working with the drop shipper. To be able to have that good experience, you need to have your two systems talking. And traditionally, EDI was the way you integrated via dropshipper. For those that are not familiar with EDI, electronic, electronic data interchange, it was built to replace the facts. That's how old it is. And it was literally just this non human readable files that were translated. Interesting enough, it's still used by most of the large players, Walmart, Amazon, Target, all the big retailers.
Travis Mariea [00:08:19]:
Still a lot of times require EDI because they've built their whole system infrastructure around it. But it's very tough to implement. It's very fragile. It's not a standard like it might sound. It can differ from retailer to retailer. It's very time consuming to set up. So at the very base level, thats how people started integrating from a retailer to a supplier and then obviously moving on to integrating drop ship as well between that retailer and that supplier still around today. But thats at the base level, the one you want to avoid.
Travis Mariea [00:08:49]:
Three mode setups, costly things like that. Its slowly evolved to, and you see this today a lot where theres CSV files that are hosted on a Dropbox location or an FTP to provide live inventory and there's custom scripts written that a lot of entry level developers can write a script to update a file. So it made things a little bit easier. They're human readable. It simplified that EDI process of transferring files, but still wasn't great. We saw the rest API really bring things forward a lot further in that with good documentation. It's a very efficient way to translate data back and forth between two systems. And so the rise of the API has really been a game changer for just integration as a whole.
Travis Mariea [00:09:35]:
But it still requires a developer, and you need a good developer to make sure that they can properly read the documentation. Integrate, deal with rate limiting, deal with pagination, things like that. So that was good, but it still required developer. Where we're at now and why I'm so excited about dropship and the integration between partners and commerce is that we've got these connectors that say you don't have to be developer. We've already built all these pre built integrations to every OpenaPI system that is out there. Shopify, bigcommerce, any new software that's been rolled out has an API. In most cases everyone, probably on your podcast a good bit, probably know about Zapier. That's a great example of an iPass, an integration platform as a service that helps you just integrate more commerce, focused ones like Soligo out there and alloy and things like that.
Travis Mariea [00:10:28]:
What we did with Flexpoint is because we're focused on drop ship, we built an order and inventory management system with an IPass built in. So now when it comes to integrating your vendor, who's on Shopify, you just haven't installed a Shopify app and you automatically are pulling in product data, automatically syncing inventory, automatically sending orders and tracking information back and forth. No developer, no custom code. For those that are on Shopify, on bigcommerce, we even have them with open source platforms like Magento and Woocommerce, things like that. So what the big hurdle was when integrating with dropship suppliers was how do we integrate? Who's going to write it? Do I have a developer? Do I not have a developer? How do I deal with Edi now? Today it's I'm on Shopify, you're on Shopify. I'm on bigcommerce, you're on Magento. Does it matter? Just use a system like Flexboy or any other kind of iPass out there to easily connect with your partners essentially, and start working together.
Claus Lauter [00:11:23]:
Hey, Claus here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter dot e commercecoffeebreak.com I score and create 50 news sources so you don't have to, saving your hours of research. Grow your revenue with e commerce news, marketing strategies, tools, podcast, interviews and more, all in a quick three minute read. So head over to newsletter dot e commerce coffeebreak.com to subscribe as at 100% free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. Okay, no, makes perfect sense. Obviously that helps a lot.
Claus Lauter [00:11:52]:
I remember the times dealing with CSV files and it was a pain in the neck. There were so many errors in there. So this just was not a good experience. Now, when you work with a partner on the other side and you only want to source, I don't know, certain product ranges and synchronizing the stock and all of that, how do you keep control from your site that you really only source the products that you want to have and so on?
Travis Mariea [00:12:15]:
Yeah, that's a great question. And I can tell you've got experience in here. Just be able to dive in there, or at least have heard of the complexities there. So what we do with Flexpoint, specifically because we are in the business of building out a larger catalog, not the one skew dropship, aliexpress thing, but building a larger catalog to bolster your brand online, you know, build an experience on your, on your website. So you're dealing with a lot of products are available to you. We have a, we have two screens, really three, but two that mainly matter where you can see the entire product feed. So whether you're integrated BSCSB file or EDI or an API like, still has to happen for some of your vendors that require it, or you connect it to a Shopify store, a magenta store, whatever it might be, all those products are brought into a single screen, and from there you can look through that, search through that, and then move them to a catalog and have them available for your store. And we have a multi channel catalog as well.
Travis Mariea [00:13:12]:
We've built specifically the IMs and the Pim tooling within our system to say, here's all that's available to you with rich imagery and titles, inscriptions and custom fields and attributes that you can easily filter. And then you can select those products in our user interface and say, list that to Amazon, list that to Shopify. List that to both Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, and my other big commerce store. So we give you those screens to kind of manage them in one spot.
Claus Lauter [00:13:40]:
Okay, that sounds like an amazing feature, something that should make merchants life much, much easier now when it comes to getting the information after the purchase and after delivery. So we're talking about shipping details, tracking info and so on and so forth. Is that also something that you pull from the vendor and basically forward to the customer?
Travis Mariea [00:13:59]:
We do, and that has been, I believe that's a big piece of the efficiency that we add, is we have a lot of customers saying we receive an order. We lot of times have to manually send the order to our vendor. Right. And we kind of help with that piece. But the biggest one was always, okay, I might be able to automate like an email po or something, but getting the tracking back up to my store was always tough. So, yes, you help in that full cycle, not only from what we call left to right is getting the products up, listed in synced, and then right to left, which is the orders down to your vendor, and then back up the shipping tracking to your customer. And nowadays, we'll update the order status and bigcommerce and Shopify specifically. I can think off the top of my head, we'll push the tracking up, we'll mark the status as shipped, and then all that normal communication will come from your shopify store with your branding, with all of your proper messaging that you had for any other order.
Claus Lauter [00:14:55]:
Do you have any other kind of integrations that are exotic when it comes to running a store for, I don't know, specific industries or niche?
Travis Mariea [00:15:03]:
Over the years, there's a lot of integrations that are not as plug and play because the distributor, the vendor, the brand, whoever it might be, has a pre built system that requires a custom integration. And so on, top of being an order and inventory management system, we have a full integration team. We have a dozen developers constantly working on integration. We have about 194 95, I think, is where we're at right now. Pre built integrations to the large distributors in the auto parts space and the furniture space. And there's a ton of other industries that we've got, even in a ton of different industries that we serve, where we have plug and play distributors built into our system where you don't have to go hire a developer and they're ready to go one click process of loading their products in.
Claus Lauter [00:15:53]:
Now, you're obviously talking to a lot of vendors out there. Do you see some specific trends or industries where dropshipping is really picking up right now compared to, I don't know, a year or two years ago?
Travis Mariea [00:16:04]:
Traditionally, it's been big in those markets. I mentioned the industries that automotive, even in the firearm, adult space, furniture, where there's these big distributors that exist that have pre built feeds and connect. I will say that drop ship is becoming more and more popular in this new influencer ecosystem where we have people on TikTok and Instagram and things like that, where even though apparel, there's high return rates and there's sizing issues and things like that and less margin, in a lot of cases, if you have an audience and you're not a traditional retailer, you're not used to commerce. Drop ship can be a quick, easy way to get going. And so I think these little niche markets that influencers can tap into are starting to open up opportunities for drop ship. I heard of, you know, my, uh, there's a local guy here that has, like, a rubber stamp company from, from back in the day. Uh, we know rubber stamps for your name and things like that, where he's got one influencer out of nowhere, just showed up and starts sending them, you know, dozens of orders a day, make a couple hundred in, like, big days, whatever it might be, um, where he would have never expected that, uh, as their business has pivoted to something else completely. But he's getting these orders that someone tapped into this weird niche market on TikTok, and now he's getting dropship orders from them.
Travis Mariea [00:17:22]:
So I think, if anything, we're seeing more of a distributed approach to all these little markets you can tap into because of the influencer economy.
Claus Lauter [00:17:32]:
Okay, that's a very interesting insight. How does the onboarding process look like with flxpoint? What's the timeline there?
Travis Mariea [00:17:39]:
We've had people sending orders within a couple of days, three to four days. We've also had large invitations where you're bringing on 10, 15, 20 vendors is kind of what you want to have on it before you go live. And so that could be like a 90 even to 120 implementation. If you're bringing on catalogs, you're commuting with vendors. So that's kind of what we do see, I'd say on average, we're looking from like a 30 day to 90 day experience, getting up and going. If you are an established retailer with an established store, and you have multiple vendors you want to bring on board, there's a project management piece to it.
Claus Lauter [00:18:12]:
Okay, brings me to the question, who's your perfect customer?
Travis Mariea [00:18:16]:
Yeah. Our perfect customers for Flexpoint is, you know, a retailer that has established vendor network that is, is looking to automate more of their business that they do today manually. Ideally, they're doing, you know, at least 3 million to $5 million GMB annually, you know, shows that they've kind of got an established business and kind of need, you know, have got past the manual side of things. Um, so, you know, SMB for sure, but definitely we're leaning toward mid market. But anyone that has a drop ship component or wants to add a dropship component, um, to, to automate more of what they're doing already online, we have another brand, um, that's a little bit more SMB focused inventory source.com that, um, you know, that's really anyone that's just getting up, getting going. Uh, you can be live in the matter of a couple hours by integrating with that pre built network I mentioned. That kind of focus is there where Flexpoint is really looking for the more established retailer, looking to automate what theyre doing manually.
Claus Lauter [00:19:17]:
Okay, give me a bit of an overview on the pricing structure. How does that work?
Travis Mariea [00:19:22]:
Pricing structure were roughly $800 a month. A lot of times we are looking for annual contracts and annual payments, but we do have options to go down to monthly when it makes sense. Right now, our, our team today mostly manages the kind of the sales, pricing and things like that. However, we do have a light version of our app coming out where it's going to go back to that. You can buy it on the website. Roughly 700, 600, $700 a month will be that price point. But that's how it looks today because inventory sources, our sister company, very similar, a little more soviet, that's at dollar 99 a month. Flexpoint is really for that more serious retailer.
Claus Lauter [00:20:03]:
Before we come to the end of the coffee break today, is there anything that you want to share with the listeners that we haven't covered yet?
Travis Mariea [00:20:08]:
As an advocate of the dropshipping model, I think everyone has their preconceived notions of it because of a YouTube video they've seen or an experience they've had. I always like to remind people that it's a very powerful model if used correctly, as I mentioned, as it's easier and easier for partners to work together, I think you're going to see it more and more and then at the same time never realize it's happening as well. So if you're in the know and you're partnering, you're going to see it from that perspective. But I think it's become more and more seamless and you're going to receive a package that was drop shipped that you had no idea was drop ship. So I think that's really exciting for us to see that happen.
Claus Lauter [00:20:44]:
Yeah, we're on the same page there. If it's done professionally and with the right tools, it's a great experience for everyone.
Travis Mariea [00:20:51]:
Cool.
Claus Lauter [00:20:52]:
Where can people find out more about you guys?
Travis Mariea [00:20:54]:
Yeah, just flxpoint.com dot it is flx no e. So flxpoint.com. You can check us out there. We have a team, you know, ready to kind of talk you through it, live chat, all that kind of stuff as well. So happy to talk you there. I'm always happy to engage with you on LinkedIn. You can find me Travis Mary m a r I e a as well.
Claus Lauter [00:21:17]:
I will put the links in the show notes as always. Then you just want to click away. Travis, thanks so much for giving us an overview of what's happening right now in dropshipping, and I hope a lot of listeners will check your website out and I think it's a great system to make your life easier. Thanks so much. Awesome.
Travis Mariea [00:21:30]:
Thanks, class.
Claus Lauter [00:21:31]:
Hey Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast simply like comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast, and even better if you could leave a rating. Thanks again and I catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.