This month’s featured partner is Shipwire, the leader in ecommerce order fulfillment services.  Shipwire’s VP Business Development and Marketing, Nate Gilmore, recently sat down with our team and explained what an ecommerce order fulfillment service really does.

At Metaverse, we’re a service provider. As long as we have an Internet connection, we can generally deliver our services to anyone anywhere. That’s not the case for our ecommerce retail clients. While online retailers make their sales to consumers over the Internet, they don’t succeed unless they quickly and efficiently get their physical goods into the hands of those consumers, wherever they may be. To a simple services provider like us, all the storage, packing, and shipping issues a global merchant faces seem like a mind-blowing hassle.

Fortunately, Shipwire solves those issues.

With Shipwire, a retailer sends and stores some or all of its inventory to a number of strategically-located warehouses in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Hong Kong (with more international warehouses coming soon). The merchant then connects its online store with Shipwire’s fulfillment shipping services. Even before an online customer confirms the sale, Shipwire’s system takes a real-time look at inventory levels to select the right warehouse, considers multiple box sizes to pick the best packaging, and shops across multiple carriers and service levels to find the best shipping rate for every single order. When the online order is complete, Shipwire’s warehouse quickly packs and ships that order out to the destination. Most importantly, unlike most order fulfillment companies, Shipwire is enterprise logistics for everyone, not just major enterprises. Merchants pay only for inventory stored in a Shipwire warehouse and then a per-item fee based on the number of orders filled.

In turn, we complement Shipwire as the outsourced agents for the retailer, providing fast and friendly order fulfillment support across multiple channels: CRM ticket, telephone, live chat and social media. With Shipwire and Metaverse, an online merchant can leave fulfillment and support to the experts and concentrate on the creative side of the business.

In fact, with Shipwire, we could transform ourselves from a pure services provider and finally launch that line of customer support action figures . . .

–Mike Pinkerton | COO | @mikepink

Photo credit, Bryce Johnson, http://www.flickr.com/photos/brycej/2607596779/

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