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• Michael Sene


• Director of Sales at Deliverr

Bio:

Michael Sene is the Director of Sales with Deliverr. He works with more than a dozen fulfillment specialists, oversees the onboarding of all new sellers, and helps those sellers increase revenue through current and new sales channels.

Sponsors:

• Spark Shipping

Links:

https://deliverr.com

Transcript:

Charles (00:00 ):

In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk with Michael Sene about how to ship today or next day without breaking the bank. This is a business e-commerce episode 159.

Charles (00:19 ):

Welcome to the Business of eCommerce the show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I’m Charles and I’m here today with Michael Sene. Michael is the director of sales at deliver where they help retailers get faster next day or two day shipping on all their products. I think they’re doing something new here, and it’s pretty interesting to see how, as a independent retailer, you can actually get next day, two day shipping to try to really compete with the big guys like an Amazon or a Walmart. And this is something that’s becoming more and more important in the game of retail. Now folks are expecting it and it’s something that people are just becoming very used to. So they’ve really changed the model they’re using technology to do this. I think it’s kind of interesting chat to kind of go into how they’re doing this and to put some thought into where as a retailer, you want to be now, and in the future, when maybe the expectation goes from two days to one day or one hour, wherever it is. And he kind of talks about that and kind of get you in that mind space of thinking, what do I want to be now and in the future. So it’s going to show, so, Hey, Michael, how are you doing today? I’m

Michael (01:25 ):

Doing great. I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

Charles (01:27 ):

Yeah. Awesome. I have you on, I think this topic is very timely on fast shipping. This is, this is the era of the whole shipping pocalypse where we’ve seen a lot of people struggle with this. So it’s good to kind of talk through this.

Speaker 2 (01:41 ):

So we’re talking. Oh yeah. It’s it’s

Charles (01:45 ):

I think Amazon, especially this year has kind of got us all addicted to like quick shipping, right? So two day shipping, we talk about that next day shipping. And I think a lot of retailers want to provide this on their own and everyone’s kind of struggling to, how do I get from my standard ups ground? You know, that could take a week and try to like, bring that down to close it, to match Amazon or compete. And you can pay that you can pay for air obviously, but doing that affordably, I think it’s kind of a trick and I think you have some experience with us, right?

Michael (02:17 ):

Yeah, I do. I think you bring up a great point just to start. When you think about the problem is you need to do it at a low rate and really fast. And I think everyone’s trying to tackle this problem from your big retailer to your smaller Shopify merchants, your e-commerce merchants on marketplace. Everyone’s trying to solve this. I think the issue is they’re taking at it the wrong approach, right? When you think about it to get today at a low rate, your items need to be in at least four to five warehouses to get next day and same day, your items need to be in 10 to 18 different warehouses. And a lot of large retailers are overly invested in their current setup. That’s for retail, right? And the position of their FCS are not in the right places. So, you know, getting to that same day or next day is a, is a massive challenge of capital that you would have to invest in.

Michael (03:07 ):

And your smaller merchant, you know, naturally wants to do this, but doesn’t have the capability. And then when you think about companies that are offering this, you really have, Amazon is the only one. And when you think about what deliver has is we have an asset light model. So we’re able to expand a lot quicker. We noticed this problem. You can’t just throw money at this problem. It has to be something where you connect a lot of FCS together, together, a lot of warehouses, and you create that network to be able to access next day and same day and offer a very low fulfillment rate. And that’s the only way you can really tackle it. Either you have an asset light model or an extremely asset heavy model. And the other thing is you need lots of carriers. The traditional model is you have one, one or two carrier agreements, ups or FedEx, the norm. When you think about Amazon, they have sortation centers and the item leaves those. And it goes directly to the person they don’t, you know, utilize one or two carriers. Essentially every truck is its own carrier. And so you need to address it at that length as well on the carrier end and for deliver. We we’re fortunate enough to work with at least nine carriers and we’re adding more regional carriers national carriers, and that allows us to get lower rates and access that, you know, fast fulfillment that that people want.

Charles (04:22 ):

Hm. Okay. So I want to make sure a couple of terms out FCS fulfillment centers, farrowing, that kind of missed that part. And then we said asset level, asset heavy versus asset life we’re talking fulfillment centers is like having physical, like distribution in your like owning the distribution chain. Yeah.

Michael (04:37 ):

I mean, when you think about a traditional fulfillment company, you’re tasked with the decision of expanding, building a warehouse buying property, that’s extremely asset heavy. You have to hire the folks. And, and right now there’s a lot of warehouses in the country that are willing to, you know, work into a network like deliver and partner in a sense where we can actually utilize them into a network that we control end to end. The best way to put it is, think about Uber. When you had the taxis, you had multiple different taxi companies and what did Uber do? They connected all the drivers together. So that way, when you requested one, you were getting a driver that was in your neighborhood, not 30 miles away, like the ages of the taxi, where you would have to call someone and wait an hour.

Charles (05:20 ):

If you’re an independent retail, though, you’re trying to string together these different fulfillment centers. You know, if they want, let’s say they want to do it themselves. Is there even a way to do that? Like, you know, cause you’re sightseeing, like you could go to each fulfillment center and when you said, actually let those numbers you at the beginning, how many would you need to do next day?

Michael (05:38 ):

You need to, you need to do at least 10 to 18 warehouses to get a low rate next day fulfillment. Right? Could you air, you could air ship it, but they’re just never there. Right. So, yeah.

Charles (<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/Edit?token=huqQaNUzx9WuN3YnerRCKlMXe1iCuhQGUOIJUMvV9J9AWewPnu-373S0fyXH5iGnrqvn33T44-ihX5-0_YOvgNgFf4g&loadFrom=Do