Shopify Upgrades Shipping with Vibhor Chhabra

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down how Shopify upgrades shipping. To drop these vibe bombs, I have brought Vibhor, Chabra, and EO Fire Studios. Vibhor is the director of product at Shopify, where he leads product strategy across shipping, delivery promise, and tax compliance, helping merchants ship predictably and tax correctly. During his time at Shopify, he has laid the global expansion of shipping and tax products across North America, Europe, United Kingdom, and Australia.

0:37And today we will be talking about really key stuff, how shipping can be a bottleneck or our competitive edge, how to make it our competitive edge, how to run your entire fulfillment process from one dashboard, and how to scale in a more efficient way and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Shopify and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate it's all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies. Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.

1:21Franocity has helped hundreds of people leave unfulfilling jobs, invest in recession-resilient businesses and creates legacy income for their families through franchising. Get started today with Franocity's franchise funding guide, packed with real world strategies to launch your business without draining your savings. Visit Franocity.com. That's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y.com. Vibhor, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Take it away, my friends. John, thank you for having me here. What most people disagree with, I'm not sure this qualifies, but let's go with this.

2:11I think that being able to disagree constructively with your manager or with the executives is a very important skill. And it's not about, it's about how you disagree and how much conviction you have about the disagreement you're having and how you present your disagreement. And it's very important. and folks who do it well end up building a strong reputation and a lot of respect about how they handle these situations. So I think that's what I'll say. Growing up early in my career, I'm like, oh, I have to agree with my managers or executives. But that's not always true. It's more about do you have conviction in the disagreement?

3:05And if you do have the conviction, how are you presenting your disagreement? No, I love that because for me, I always respect when people say, you know what? I understand what you're saying, but I have a little bit of a different viewpoint. Like, let's talk about it. I think that's a very healthy discussion. The last thing we need are yes men and yes women just kind of nodding their heads at everything that the quote unquote boss is saying. And Fire Nation, speaking of just absolutely going above and beyond doing the right thing, We're talking today about how Shopify upgrades shipping. And Vipor, I want to be real with Fire Nation, my audience, because shipping can be a real bottleneck or it can be our competitive edge.

3:48How specifically is Shopify empowering entrepreneurs to ship faster and save more? Yeah, I am actually super excited to talk about what's new with shipping at Shopify. Over the last couple of years, we've made a significant number of investments, all aimed at empowering merchants to have more choice and having their choice built right into Shopify. As we talk through this, John, I want to also just mention this, but we can come back to this later, that we've also made a number of improvements for merchants who have outgrown self-shipping and want to find the right third-party logistics partner via SFM.

4:29But we can come to that later. So back to shipping. A few things. Number one, we have added a number of world-class partners across the world. So our merchants who are shipping domestically in many countries and cross-border have the choice to ship from and to have the choice of a number of carrier partners based on where they're shipping from or to, what kind of products they're shipping, and what are they optimizing for. Some merchants are optimizing for cost and some merchants are optimizing for shipping as fast as possible. So we have now that choice available on Shopify. Second, there's a lot of capabilities that we've added in and around buying the label that is extremely helpful for merchants, especially because a lot of merchants don't know about these capabilities or that they need them.

5:25So, for example, if you're starting your business on day one, you don't really know, hey, do I need address validation? Do I need delivery predictions? What about a delightful tracking experience? What about insurance and claims? All of these things and more are available to our merchants when they buy a label, purchase a label from Shopify. And they're all helpful. We can go into more detail. But they're all very helpful in improving conversion at the point of checkout, but also enabling buyers to have a delightful experience. And then they come back for repeat purchase, which every merchant wants.

5:58Right. And then another thing we are doing is as these merchants grow and scale their business, they might want to ship cross border to get to more customers. We are dramatically expanding our cross border options. There are policy shifts that are happening around the world, and we are adding more options like DDU and DDP, which is delivered duty unpaid and delivered duty paid. So options where we will help the merchant, the merchant just buys the label and we'll help calculate the duties and taxes for the merchant so they don't have to worry about as policy shifts happen. And lastly, as merchants further grow and their shipping workflows become more complex, we are now supporting merchants to buy labels in bulk up to 250 labels, manage pick lists, etc.

6:49And this is an area we'll continue to invest in. So hopefully that makes sense, John. I can go into more detail. But the TLDR is the product is very different from where it was even one year ago. And new merchants, both small and large, are opting for Shopify shipping and finding a huge benefit in all of these capabilities being baked into the platform. And Fire Nation, I can actually vouch from firsthand experience. That's the thing I probably love most about Shopify. I've been using their product, their service for, sorry, since 2015. So 10 years now. And I've just seen this evolution and the evolution is amazing.

7:29They're always thinking about their clients first to improve that experience. So like imagine Fire Nation running your entire fulfillment process on just one dashboard? Not like all these cobblestone Frankenstein things. How does Shopify Vibhor let entrepreneurs manage every order from any channel straight through to delivery all from one dashboard? How do they do it? I think it comes back. First of all, I mean, it's great to hear that you're using our product and you're seeing the evolution because I think that that part really, it makes me really happy that you're noticing those changes. So as a customer of your feedback, you can share feedback as well after this call.

8:12So coming back to your question, I think it all comes back. So your question was, hey, how do we manage bringing everything together in one spot? The North Star is the merchant, right? Like what does the merchant need? And how do we simplify, how do we give merchants a lot of choice and agency while simplifying the process and simplifying their workflows. You know, I'm coming from a meeting where we were talking about some of the shipping workflows and, okay, this is pretty complex. How do we simplify something that's not live yet? So it's not available today. But so there's a lot of emphasis in simplification.

8:49So providing choice and simplifying. And I think you can see there's a tension there. The more choice you provide, the more complex things might get. But the emphasis is on adding choice without taking away the simplification. and see that's key fire nation because there's one thing that i've realized as an entrepreneur now for over 13 years with entrepreneurs on fire simple sales fancy fails and if you realize that you realize you want to take out the complications in your life and shopify giving you this one single truth this one single dashboard to connect to everything that you need that is so simple and there's so much beauty within that and we have a lot to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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13:06Visit Franocity.com. That's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y.com to download your free franchise funding guide today. Okay, Vipour, we're back. And listen, Fire Nation, they are entrepreneurs. They are small business owners across the board. And we all know that a lot of entrepreneurs, they don't run out of energy. They don't run out of ideas. They run out of money. So saving money is really important. And if we can save money on shipping, that means more fuel for our business. Let's get into detail about how Shopify is giving entrepreneurs access to literally the lowest global shipping rates and letting them both buy and print labels right from their dashboard.

13:49And this is with zero limits and no extra fees. How are you doing that? Yeah, I love this question. Thanks, John. So there's a few things we're doing actually to make the merchant cost of shipping really low. So number one, you mentioned we have unbeatable rates. We have negotiated with each partner. So if you are a small merchant who's just starting your own business, you might not have enough order volume to negotiate rates with carrier partners. We have already done that on your behalf because of the volume that we have. And so you get access to unbeatably low rates on day one when you're shipping your first order.

14:28So that's the cost of shipment or the cost of label purchase itself. But then there's the other thing. As you grow and scale, maybe you'll reach a point. Hopefully you'll reach a point where you now have enough order volume, where you're going to have your own contract with carrier partners. Great. We let you use your own rates on our platform. Still get access to all of the capabilities shipping provides with your own rates. So, you know, when you get to that point. And the third thing, we talked about a few capabilities. Let me dive deeper into them. So I talked about address validation. And John, you mentioned how we don't charge any fees and no subscription, nothing.

15:09So besides the Shopify subscription you pay for and the label purchase cost that you have, there's no fee for any of the things I'm about to mention. They all come with the label. So first, address validation. What if your address is, what if the buyer address is not perfect? You know, we've all seen like, hey, we'll write Avenue and it should be AVE or small things like that. A lot of times that will end up in the package getting delayed. So your delivery might be scheduled for three days from now, and that's going to happen five days later because it was delayed. The address didn't confirm, right?

15:43And you might even have to pay a fee for that address correction. But because you provide address validation for free, we already take care of that, and you don't have a delayed delivery. You don't have an address correction fee, right? That's one example. Second, this is my favorite, claims and insurance. We insure every US domestic package for up to$200. What does that mean? That means that when you're shipping a package to the buyer, if that package gets lost, who's footing the bill? The merchant, the carrier, the customer? All this becomes a tension and you have to figure it out. But because we're providing claims insurance up to$200, if that happens, we will help you through a very simplistic way.

16:32Just file that claim and boom, it's taken care of. And the beauty here is most of our merchants don't realize that's the case until they need it. And when they need that, they're delighted that we already had their back on this and they don't have to eat this cost. A third example is tracking. We provide tracking on every order that is fulfilled via Shopify, where you purchase a label from Shopify, or you bring your own label via your carrier partnership. So why is that really important? You don't have to pay for it. That's part of the service. But this is the hidden part. But for the customer, it is a very delightful experience when they have the shop app and they have real-time updates about where the order is in minutes getting delivered.

17:23And I think most customers don't see the part where the order is received by the customer and they have a smile on their face because the order was packaged well, it was delivered on time, and they got what they wanted. And it is some of the missing piece of shipping. We all invest so much in building a great shipping experience, but we don't see the outcome of that, which is the smile of the customer when they receive the package. But the way we measure that is repeat customer purchases. If that customer is happy with that experience, they're going to come back. So all of these capabilities that I mentioned, some are cutting the cost because we're not charging for them, but others are additive because they're going to bring your customers back and make more sales.

18:09So Viv Hor, you've used the word delight multiple times in this episode, which is actually one of my favorite words because I don't know why, but so few businesses ever even think about delighting their customers, delighting their clients, delighting their partners. It's obviously top of mind for you. It's obviously top of mind for Shopify. And I just love that. I want to point that out. And then number two, you, Fire Nation, can grow with Shopify. That's one thing I'm really taking away from everything that Viv Horst is saying is no matter where you start, the capabilities that you can utilize within Shopify grow with you.

18:48As they expand, as your business expands, you can tap into their deeper and deeper resources and products and services and tools, which is just simply amazing. Because the reality is, sometimes we're going to be scaling what we're doing. And Viv Hor, scaling our fulfillment, for instance, it shouldn't mean we have to overhaul our entire system. So how does Shopify Fulfillment Network actually connect entrepreneurs with the right logistics partners so that we can grow without missing a beat? Great question, John. So I'll connect this to something you said earlier. And it's all part of the delight equation.

19:27I'm glad you like that. But you talked earlier about how entrepreneurs are really busy. They have a lot on their plate. So one of our key principles here is merchants, entrepreneurs, their core competency is what is it that they're building that's unique, that their customers love? And how do we take stuff around that, including shipping and logistics, so they can focus their time on doubling down on what they do best with building their products, right? So as these entrepreneurs are successful, there comes a time where some of them may decide, I don't want to self-ship anymore. At that point, if you've never worked with a third-party logistics partner before, you start learning, this is a very, there's many, many, many choices here.

20:21the whole pricing structure is very complex. There's too many variables to understand. So what we're doing again is helping simplify. So we have a select set of partners. Our preferred partners, Flexport. We are adding seven new partners including Amazon MCF. Three of them are already live. ShipMonk, ShipBob and ShipFusion. So by the end of August we'll have seven additional partners. So total of eight. And what we're doing here is number one, again, you have choice, you have the agency to work with any of these partners and besides beyond these as well. And second, what we're trying to do is if you've never worked with a third party logistics partner, we are simplifying the selection process.

21:04We are saying based on where you ship from and to, based on the kind of products you have, here are the recommended partners for your business. And here is what might cost for a per unit shipment. And then we'll connect you to those partners. Shopify doesn't play a role. It's the third party logistics partner and our entrepreneur who will have the discussion. But we'll help you connect to them so you don't have to figure out everything on your own. So that's the beauty of Shopify Fulfillment Network. And we'll keep scaling this further as well. And that is one thing that I love is that, again, Shopify is continuing to scale.

21:43They're continuing to look for partners. They're continuing to look for ways to surprise and then delight their customers, their clients, the people that are using Shopify in general. And Vibhor, I really pride myself with not overloading Fire Nation with too much so they don't just go brain numb with all this amazing information. You shared a lot today. And we've talked about scaling our fulfillment, saving money on shipping, running our entire fulfillment on one dashboard. I mean, there's so much there, but there's still more. And I just love how Shopify, again, can really customize an experience for each one of their customers, each one of their clients, and each one of their partners.

22:23So of everything that we've talked about here today, what would you say is the one thing that you would like our listeners to walk away with from our conversation? I think the key thing I'll highlight is there's a lot more to shipping than just purchasing a label. and we're taking care of all of that. We have baked all of those things right into the Shopify platform so you don't have to worry about it. You just go about your core business, growing it, and we'll take care of all of the bells and whistles and ifs and vends that are needed for making shipping successful. And Vipor, if Fire Nation is listening and they want to learn more and maybe connect and take the next step with Shopify, what is your call to action for our listeners today?

23:13So it's actually really easy. If you go to Shopify admin and log in and go to settings and shippings, you can activate shippings in a few seconds. So just activate shipping, select the carriers you want and boom, you're ready to go. If you want to talk to us, my email address is myfirstname.lastname at shopify.com. Reach out to me if you have questions or feedback. But otherwise, Shopify.com slash shipping has all the updates of the capabilities that are available for our merchants. And we'll link all this up in the show notes page, Fire Nation. So you just need to remember that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

23:54You've been hanging out with VC and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything that we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Vibhor, that's V-I-B-H-O-R, in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. Vibhor, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. John, thank you for having me over. I really appreciate your time and your audience for listening to us today. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Vibhor for sponsoring today's episode. and Fire Nation.

24:31Are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world? If yes, we are now accepting applications for entrepreneurs on fire. So to learn more about becoming a guest, visit eofire.com slash guest. And I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Franocity has helped hundreds of people leave unfulfilling jobs, invest in recession-resilient businesses, and create legacy income for their families through franchising.

25:18Get started today with Franocity's Franchise Funding Guide, packed with real-world strategies to launch your business without draining your savings. visit franocity.com. That's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y dot com.