A Boutique Owners Guide To Shipping And Receiving - Cutting Your Package Losses |

Hey, it's episode number 237 with a tool that you may or may not know about yet, but I can't wait for you to. It's with my friends at Route. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. All right, you guys, have you ever had this nightmare happen? If you are an e commerce business where your customer has ordered a package but all of a sudden emailed you saying the package is nowhere to be found and they're thinking it's your fault and your tracking is showing that the package is delivered. Now, did the dog eat it? Did the neighbor next do or steal it? Did the postmaster happen to be your same size and fashion taste? I don't know. But unfortunately it's one of the biggest customer service headaches that any e commerce business is going to face. So I'm really excited today to introduce you to a tool, if you don't know them already, a brand new partner of the Boutique Hub who we've heard awesome feedback with and that's our friends at Route. Today, Kyle, who has been a part of the fast growing team at Route, is going to talk to us about what this tool is so how it works, how it alleviates stress for not only you and the consumer, but also if you are a wholesaler, how Route might also benefit you knowing that those seven $800 packages, thousand $2000 packages, are just as important as any package that you ship your end to end consumer. So guys, please help me welcome my friend Kyle. Today we're going to talk about how this tool is changing how we think about shipping. Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast this week. For those of you who are in E commerce, this is the episode for you to take some notes. So guys, welcome this week to the show. My friend Kyle Rooney, who is the partnership manager at Route. Kyle, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Very, very excited to be here. I'm excited to kind of dive into this with you.

I love the fact that on the show we get to talk about new solutions or new strategies or new big ideas that are coming to the industry and how boutique owners can take advantage of them. So that's going to be the topic today, isn't it?

Yes. Yeah. There's a lot happening in E Commerce and services like Route are trying to help lift some of the, I would call minutia or headache from boutique owners plates.

Absolutely. So let's start here. Tell me, if someone is not familiar with Route, what is the big problem that you solve?

Yeah, for sure. So the main issue, right, it's 2019 packages are all being shipped through like the main four carriers, right? UPS, USPS, FedEx and like DHL probably. And as E commerce grows year over year, there's more and more shipping issues. Right. Packages aren't showing up and unfortunately that reflects negatively on the brand. You do your best as a website owner to create this awesome experience. You pay to get traffic to your site. You know, they have an awesome brand experience purchasing on your site and then, you know, customer hits submit and then it's out of your hands. So Route really is a solution to kind of bring some more control back into, you know, a merchant's hands.

That's awesome. So talk to me about like the old way versus the new way. I know that so many people listening have had that nightmare situation where they get an email from a customer saying, hey, where's this package? It never arrived and tracking says that it should have.

Yeah, that's the worst email you can get, right? You upheld your end of the deal, the customer paid and it was somebody else's fault. So yeah, the old way kind of how most people deal with it. You know, I talk to a lot of merchants every day and it's, you know, I'll hear Kyle, oh, you know, we already have insurance. I'm like, oh, like how do you, how do you typically insure? And they're like, oh well, you know, we ship with USPS and they give us, you know, $50 or $100 in free shipping insurance and you know, we'll talk about that. I'm like, okay, you know, talk me through. Customer calls, you, package doesn't show up, it says delivered. What do you have to do? And they, you know, typically they laugh like, oh well, I have to, you know, get on the phone and reach out to the carrier and I spend 30 minutes on the phone call and then they tell me I have a 17 to 14 day resolution time. And you know, then the merchant gets caught in between a rock and a hard place of do I provide good customer experience by just eating the loss and sending a new product to my customer in hopes that FedEx or UPS or the carrier takes care of me or do I make my customer wait until I've kind of been approved and know that I won't have a loss on this package. But either one is kind of a lose lose because the merchants either out the money or the customer has to wait 17 to 14, maybe up to 30 days for a resolution man.

So it makes such a huge impact because now what you're doing is you're putting the power in the consumer's hand and saying, hey, rather than the retailer have to deal with this headache, the consumer chooses at checkout if they want to have insurance and now it's in their hands. Correct?

Yeah, yes, absolutely. Right. We didn't, you know, reinvent the wheel here. We just kind of made it a better experience. Right. So we instead of the merchant covering the, or the carrier covering the, like covering the package with like free insurance, the customer. Exactly. They have an option at checkout to purchase insurance. Kind of that journey for a customer looks like this. They purchase route for either $0.98 if the package is under $100. Above $100 is about 1% of cart value. And they'll receive an email from Route that says essentially, you know, once they purchase Route, if your package is lost, damaged or stolen, file a claim here. The claim takes, I think if you're typing slowly, takes 60 seconds. It's only like seven or eight fields. And when you hit submit, our team reaches out to you within 24 hours. The kind of cool part is if you're in, if it's domestic, I mean it's closer to six. We have a really, really good response time. And then over 50% of those claims are handled with one touch, meaning our representative gets back to you and says, so sorry this happened, we repurchased this shirt in green and here's the new order confirmation number. It'll be at your house in X amount of days. Customer doesn't have to do anything. They don't have to wait and they. And they get it taken care of easy and fast.

That's awesome. Do you find when a boutique, say, just starts to use Route on their e commerce site, do you think there's like an education period or what are some of the best practices that you've seen boutiques use to onboard their customers to understand that route's an option and how it works?

Yeah, so there is definitely an education piece. And as we're growing and evolving, you know, we have more like a bigger knowledge base and during onboarding it kind of gets into the details a little bit. More of how would you like us to. It's a new feature that's rolling out and onboarding. I should say that. So, you know, how would you like us to work with you and your customers? So kind of to take a step back, let's say a customer. So what we see is about 75% of the time a customer files a claim because they purchased route, they'll actually reach out directly to us. They'll remember they got the email and they'll kind of do what I call self serve and our team will just take care of it. And it completely goes around the merchant and they don't worry about it. The other 25% of the time, typically we see customers reach back out to the merchant. So back to the boutique and say, hey, my package never showed up. I purchased route. The boutique owner has a few different tools they can use to resolve this issue first, which is easy. They can be like, hey, you actually received an email at checkout. You can go file a claim with that button 2 in the dashboard that you onboard with. There's actually. You can look up the order number and there's a. You can file a claim from the dashboard on behalf of your customer. For the boutique owners. So say it's maybe a more high touch customer. They're really upset. You don't want to do a pass to our team. Totally fine. You can just file a claim on behalf of the customer. And then the third way is you can just have them reach out to us@supportout.com so, you know, and then it's. There's a little bit more communication. Right. We'll have to figure out all the information that the claim. But the claim form is asking for. But you know, we do everything we can to alleviate. Alleviate that CS time for the boutique owner.

Awesome. That's a big deal. I feel like, and I'm sure every boutique owner listening feels like there is this black hole somewhere at USPS where everybody's lost and stolen packages go. So that's pretty, pretty cool. Do you. I know you're on Shopify. Are there other verticals or not verticals, but platforms that you are integrated with as well?

Yeah, so we are integrated. We have a Magento 1 and 2 extension and then we have a Woocommerce plugin. It's actually in beta and so there's a few little last tweaks and I know that we're in the store already, so if you search us, you'll find us. But that's our beta version. But that should be done here in the next few weeks. And then we also have just API docs. So any platform that you're selling on that you can insert API calls to without getting too technical, you can offer Route. So a lot of platforms like BigCommerce, which we don't have an actual app for yet, they have the ability to implement via API. And our team actually over here offers free white glove installations for any platform you're on. So Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, or just, you know, API again, our team does that at no cost to the boutique owner.

Super cool. I know you're going to get this question or you've probably gotten it a lot, but there's probably people looking for comment. Sold access as well.

Yeah. So we've been actually talking with Brandon over there. They have a lot of cool new features coming out for their service right now. And so I know we are re engaging, I think later in Q1, and we're really excited to work with them. They're awesome. We know that they bring a lot of value to the boutique owners and we want to make sure that, you know, customers, wherever they're buying from, you have the ability to attach route. So hang in tight. It's on the roadmap. We are, you know, actively communicating with them.

Awesome. Talk to me about some of the other. We were kind of talking about this before we started recording the podcast, but some of the other bigger stores that are using Route that you find really interesting.

Yeah. So we've kind of take a little step back. So we actually launched into Shopify January 15th of this year. So it's been a wild ride. We're just around 1700 websites offering route now.

That's crazy growth. That's awesome.

Yeah, it's been, it's been a very wild ride. I've started calling my like my months years, I call them route years. And so I've been here, I got here in March, so I've had like eight route years. It's really awesome to see that there's such a need out there. And we knew what we were onto, obviously, which is why we went through the painstaking work of getting insured by Lloyd's of London. Getting all the backing set up took about a year before we even launched our product. And so we knew that we had hoped, right, you hope before you launch a company that people will, there'll be a good product market fit. And we underestimated how bad of a need there was. So. Yeah. So we have just recently launched with Chubby's Shorts, which I think last time, they're, you know, one of the biggest Shopify pluses out there. Really cool branding. Great name, coolest guys, by the way. Very, very cool guys over there. We love working with them. We're actually working with Pura Vita, getting some last, you know, T's crossed and I's dotted before we go live on their site. So some bigger Shopify we're really excited to start working with.

That's awesome. I love if anyone doesn't follow Chubby's, I just have to put this in here. If you don't follow Chubby's, it is probably hands down some of the best marketing I've ever seen targeted to men. It is hysterical.

They are on point, they are funny. Yeah, they definitely give it a follow. They're officially a route partner, so I will give them all the praise I can because they're seriously awesome.

That is awesome. Outside of apparel, what other verticals do you guys work in?

Yeah, great question. So we have like three main, like areas of focus here at Route. We've identified these areas as like where we do solve a real need. One is apparel, right. And then two, we have health, beauty, fitness. So makeup websites where actually Millie Bobby Brown, if you're Familiar with Stranger Things 11, she has a skincare line, I think, and we're live with them. They're, they're super awesome. So health, beauty, fitness, you know, workout equipment, pills. Right. If you're buying anything online, like multivitamins, whatever, a lot of those websites. And then our third vertical that we, we focus on, which this vertical is really around, they have a lot of damaged issues is Home and Garden. So Zinus mattresses, if you're familiar with them. Actually fun fact, I bought one so they're the number one selling mattress on Amazon and I, I sleep on one. And then I ended up later reaching out to them and they loved, Love Route very. So they, they actually kind of have a funny story. They had a required signature requirement on their site and it was like creating a lot of friction for their customers because of course they show up at 11am, right? You're at work, you're never there, you have to sign for it. It's a nightmare. And so we actually use Route. They use Route to supplement that option. And so it's actually brought the cost of shipping down for their customers and they can self insure if they'd like. So yeah, Home and Garden is a good one. We're replacing a lot of damaged items in that one, but a great vertical for us A lot of customers are happy.

That's awesome. All right, I've got to back up because I feel like we've talked a lot about what route is, how it works.

Yes.

Tell me the backstory. Where did it all come from?

Great. Yes. I love this story. So our CEO, founder Evan Walker, has been in E commerce for almost 20, 25 years. Long, long time. And kind of stumbled upon this idea of he was working, he owned an agency. They had 30 or 40 websites they were consulting with, and they were kind of brainstorming on how do you increase conversion. Right. You spend all this money to get customers to your site. How do you convert them better? Right. A key component they identified was just trust. Like, have I ever been on this site before? Right. Why do people buy on Amazon? I think anybody here would agree, like, you go on Amazon because you know what you're gonna get, right? Like, you know, if anything's gonna happen, you're gonna get taken care of. Like, Amazon has the customer's back. And so building that trust in your own brand and your own environment on your dot com, you know, was where they were focused. And so, you know, it was kind of two components. They wanted to figure out, well, how can we make sure that there's visibility with the package being tracked, actually? And then the issue was, well, what if the package never shows up? So from that kind of crux, they came up with route, essentially, which is we're a two product company. The foremost product is shipping insurance, which you are all aware of. But the bigger umbrella, the bigger product is we actually have, we're an app that you can download in the Apple App Store and you can visually track anything you buy online. So if you're buying from Amazon, eBay, from your favorite boutique, anywhere you buy online, that all gets pulled into visual, like a visual map inside the app. And then you can ensure on at the website level and inside the app, you're actually able to file a claim. So this.