Disruptive Ecommerce Innovation: Matt Kubancik Merchant Testimonial - Cahoot

Hi, my name is Manish Chaudhary. I'm the founder and CEO of Kahoot. I'm here with Matt Kubancic on the floor of Prosper show day one. Matt, welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me.

And Matt is an industry veteran. He is one of the co founders of SKU Vault, which is one of the leading WMS inventory management software for marketplace sellers. Matt, give us a little background on Skuvault because you've been so intimately involved with marketplace sellers for so long.

Yeah. Appreciate you having me out. I've been a marketplace seller the last 10 years. Had my own business, sold that two years ago, started SKU Vault in 2012 with three partners and I actually exited last year. And then I'm an industry consultant for various e commerce companies and just networking and looking at new opportunities and new businesses and really interested what you guys are doing because I think it's groundbreaking in e commerce. You know, one of the most highest experiences that we experience at Streetmota and other companies that I've owned is always the difficulty of a seller, especially a third party seller, shipping across country and negotiating the rates with FedEx, post office, UPS of the world and leveraging that network, Amazon and other big companies that can afford to negotiate high level discounts that those companies have. So a company like yourself and Kahoot, leveraging a network, almost a peer network of sellers to leverage shipping could be an interesting thing in this industry.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I know that you've been involved in this space as a seller, also as a solution provider and now as a consultant. So obviously you see all the challenges that are facing merchants all the time. Shipping, you know, how important is shipping and fulfillment? And can you talk a little bit about the state of prevailing solutions available to sellers? I mean, you know, different technologies advance at different speeds. You know, ad tech moves really, really fast. Where shipping and fulfillment. Can you talk a little bit about what solutions are available to sellers today beyond the negotiations of rates which has existed for 20, 30, 50 years? I mean, can you talk a little.

Bit about that in terms there's a lot of software out there for automating your warehouse or automating the shipping process? And to your point, there's a lot of companies that have been around kind of that old guard platform of we'll negotiate better ups or FedEx rates, but I don't think there's really any SaaS type of models that are really coming out and really kind of revolutionizing the way a merchant negotiates and decreases their overall overhead in logistics. There's third party networks, there's third party fulfillment, but it just doesn't feel like there's the Uber or the Lyft of the logistical part of small to medium sized online retailers.

Thank you, Matt. One last question. Obviously Kahoot is highly innovative and revolutionary in many way, but it also requires merchants to collaborate and often that means you may be collaborating with your competitors and you may be collaborating with people. Obviously it's done in a highly intelligent, anonymous fashion. However, the net result is a win win and it doesn't result in net zero gain, which is what traditional solutions provide. So can you talk about why merchants should look at this differently and be more open minded and consider solutions like this?

When I came in this industry, the mid-2000s, people were very guarded and everything was secret. It was almost like the Cold War, like Russia and the US and people were spying on each other and trying to hide what advantages they had. As this industry's become more the barriers to entry are lower. I've seen this industry become more progressive in their ideas of sharing and collaborating. I think that's one thing they've definitely highlighted here at Prosper about collaborating with other sellers and working. I mean, you've seen the app that they released at the Showbrello where you can connect with other sellers. So I think that's a really cool feature, collaborate. And that's really the way to win because really the competition is the big conglomerates that are now coming in the space of marketplaces like Amazon and ebay and the big brands. So whether you're a private label seller or whether you're an authorized brand seller, really collaborating with your competition in a way where you're not giving away trade secrets, but you're mutually helping each other. And I think your software is so unique because it still has anonymity, but it allows you to collaborate. So it's something that's not, well, hasn't really been replicated before in this industry where yes, we can work together, but I'm not telling you all my trade secrets, so I think it could be an interesting concept.

Thank you. And thank you for joining the Kahoot network as a seller today.

Signed up today, one of the businesses.

Thank you and welcome to the Power of Many.

That's our slogan. The Power of Many. I like it. Thanks.