In this story
Snow Foam’s challenge to reach optimum order fulfilment potential
Snow Foam entered the car cleaning scene in 2014 to ensure cars across Australia remain impeccably shiny. With an immense duty to car enthusiasts across the nation, the Sydney-based startup found themselves scaling without the required shipping processes to support their growth. They needed a solution to fix the inefficiencies of repetitive manual tasks.
This is a story of how Snow Foam overhauled their shipping operations so they could ship orders at the capacity they needed to grow.
Manual order fulfilment
A lot of care goes into fulfilling Snow Foam’s customer orders. Each delivery is hand assembled before it even reaches the satchel. We spoke with their head of marketing Jeremy Khattar about their picking and packing process and where it needed to be improved. Their product is described as 'plug and play', which is the appeal to Snow Foam's customers. They can just twist the nozzle on, put the detergent in, and use it. Unfortunately, with the manpower they had, and the manual labour requirement, the business wasn’t as scalable as SnowFoam needed it to be.
With the extra time it takes to assemble Snow Foam’s customer orders, it was essential they worked out a better way to ship their orders. Before using Shippit, this was another pain point for them.
"Every order was taking an extra 15 minutes to dispatch because we had to sit down and figure out what courier we were using and how long it would take to get the parcel to the customer before we physically packed and shipped it."
Head of Marketing
Snow Foam wanted to grow, but with their operational setup, they were only able to ship ten orders a day which was a real issue for their business. On top of their inefficient initial order fulfilment process, they were spending additional time walking their parcels to the post office.
Snow Foam realised that the thing that was taking them the longest amount of time was picking the right courier at the right price. So how were Snow Foam able to rectify these issues? In the next section we’ll take you through their research and decision process.
Saving money and time with Shippit
When Snow Foam first started investigating alternative methods of shipping their parcels, they wanted to focus more on methods that would help them make things more efficient rather than focus on reducing costs.
"We were using a competing shipping solution and were walking down to Australia Post. It was taking 20 minutes every day, and we really wanted to change this."
Shippit uses the same couriers as other shipping solutions, but Shippit is one of the only solutions that allocates the cheapest carriers to the order. Snow Foam started using the recommendations Shippit was making for each order and they realised within the first 50 orders that they saved $250 on shipping costs in one week.
"We’re saving $5 per order. Our bottom line has gone through the roof"
Now with Shippit, they literally plug and play: orders are synchronised automatically from Shopify to Shippit, and they know exactly how much it will cost to ship, with the satisfaction and peace of mind of knowing that the best carrier for the order has been selected.
"It’s saved us a load of hassle and time"
Results
- $250 Saved On Shipping Each Week
- $5 Saved Per Order
- No more time wasted walking to the post office
- 15 minutes saved on packing each and every order
