Mark Applegate, operations manager at Virtual Exchanges, explains how Cahoot's shipping software automated their label printing, cut errors, and freed up staff to handle other work. The result: faster warehouse operations and business growth.
Now I can have probably half of the staff on the shipping side of things and have those employees doing other things around the warehouse. You know, inventory counts, moving product around, receiving product. So it just frees us up to do a lot more things and you know, basically acts as another employee around here. So, so that's great. My name is Mark Applegate. I'm the operations manager here at Virtual Exchanges. We're an online e commerce retail business. Been in existence for about 20 years. Sell mainly shoes, sandals, sunglasses and some other clothing accessories online. Our items are up on dozens of marketplaces. Amazon, ebay, Overstock, Walmart, I mean you name it, we try to have our items up there. Our previous process was extreme manual. We were using our third party warehouse management software. They didn't have a guaranteed delivery date so we could ship them any economy service we wanted to. And we knew the cost associated with those services. We would also then have to use another shipping software to process shipments for our express orders or orders that had a guaranteed delivery date. So to process our labels, you know, we'd have to scan the item, got the drop down list of carriers and services, pick which one was cost effective for us as well as got to the buyer on time and hit print, wait 20 seconds or so for the label to print and then move on to the next shipment. So we felt like we were sitting there just wasting time and needed more automation so that have our employees doing other things around our warehouse. The fact that we were in multiple solutions at the same time, the back and forth sometimes causes human error. We felt like we needed to be more automated and that's the way to. But we also knew that we couldn't go through another peak season for us and not have a faster, better way to print labels. After our initial upload of the data from our inventory into Kahoot, their system remembers the weights and dimensions for these packages so we don't have to type these in every time. Saves a lot of time. We're now printing labels in one system so helps eliminate the confusion and is so much faster as well as the rate shopping that goes on behind the scenes before our orders ever need to get picked for the day. We were just so much faster when we logged into that Monday morning and the labels were already there and all we had to do was print and that 20 second wait for the rate shopping was gone. I mean it sped things up tremendously. So we've got a lot more done in the warehouse on Mondays. Typically on Mondays we're just doing shipping. Oh yeah, we're definitely able to ship a lot more. We could probably get out another thousand packages a day if we had to, especially on Monday. Now I can have probably half of the staff on the shipping side of things and have those employees doing other things around the warehouse. You know, inventory counts, moving product around, receiving product. So it just frees us up to do a lot more things and, you know, basically acts as another employee around here. You know, so that's. That's great. I would say dive in. Don't hold back. You know, we tend to be very skeptical, skeptical of working with new vendors, as we've had some bad experiences in the past. Just they haven't attended to our needs. And Kahoot kind of did the opposite of that. They gave us exactly what we needed. So that's kind of been about a breath of fresh air. Plus, the staff is very responsive and, you know, seems really invested in our success. The Kahoot service has been, I mean, very receptive. They respond quickly. Some of the vendors we worked in the past, other solutions, you know, we'd have to leave a message and wait hours, sometimes days, for a response. We kind of see sitting there twiddling our thumbs, waiting for a response. And we don't have that problem with Kahoot. We can get somebody on the phone in 10 minutes, which is great. I wish we had found Kahoot five years ago, honestly. It would have eliminated a lot of growing pains. Kahoot helped us focus on other aspects of our business that need our attention. We're trying to survive out there and grow, and, you know, with having one less thing to have to worry about, to kind of put in the back of your mind and not think about it, know that it's taken care of, is a big help.
