“Fulfilment is an essential task of running a small business, but it doesn’t really help you grow or expand.”

Brock Sykes, Co-Founder of the popular sock label Odd Pears, was lucky to experience rapid sales growth at an early stage of his business. However, he struggled to prioritise tasks that would help grow his business – like growing his social media presence – with essential business tasks like fulfilling and shipping orders. 

Managing Rising Order Volumes

Picking and packing don’t usually take a long time when a business first gets going. But as order volumes begin to rise, slow picking and packing processes can become cumbersome to manage.

Odd Pears was initially able to keep up with higher-order volumes, but as their social media and PR presence grew, they found it difficult to maintain their social networks while spending hours a day fulfilling orders.

“At first we were able to manage with the amount of orders coming through – we only had a few a day here. But we started to get a lot of media coverage and we grew our online presence.

After this, an hour of packing increased to a couple hours a day spent creating labels and fulfilling orders in Shopify.”

When Odd Pears first started out, they weren’t using any picklists or pack slips to assist with order fulfilment. This meant they were would reference their Shopify store manually for all orders. 

As they started growing, picking and packing orders become more and more time-consuming.

“We’ve always been a small scale business so the time you spend packing orders is taken away from growing your business.”

Copy-pasting address customer information between systems

New business owners will understand the challenges that arise when you’re manually copying and pasting customer information between different systems. 

Not having previously used a shipping solution, Odd Pears would manually copy-paste their customer’s information into the courier portal, and then copy-paste the tracking information back into Shopify. 

Brock states: 

“There’s a hole between the customer’s address in Shopify and actually shipping their order to them.”

And this leads us to our next point….

Copy-pasting information leads to errors

Brock states that as order volumes increased, their copy-paste process led to delivery errors.

“Because we were copy-pasting everything – we’d sometimes miss a number in the address so there was a lot of human error. So we’d need to pay for shipping to resend orders while dealing with customer complaints.”

But it doesn’t just stop at failed deliveries and frustrated customers. According to Brock, Odd Pears would struggle manually maintaining tracking information.

“Sometimes we’d also forget to copy-paste the tracking information back into Shopify and the customer wouldn’t receive their updates.”

Limited access to courier quotes and shipping rates

Before Odd Pears started using Shippit, they often limited their courier quotes to one provider. This is mainly due to the fact that they simply didn’t have the time to search for multiple quotes, but also the amount of time it takes to print different sized shipping labels for different courier services (read our best practice guide of printing shipping labels here). 

Brock states:

“We wanted access to other courier accounts that we didn’t have access to at the time because we wanted cheaper courier options to reduce business costs.”

So what happened after Odd Pears connected their Shopify store with Shippit? See how they were able to spend less time picking and packing orders and more time growing their presence online.

Odd Pears halved their picking and packing time

Odd Pears is a small business and only has a few people to help pick and pack, so wasting hours a day simply wasn’t working for the savvy sock brand. 

“With Shippit, we’ve been able to halve our picking and packing time. The Shopify integration was set up within 10 minutes and once we order synced and connected our courier accounts I was able to start shipping right away.”

Shippit eliminates the manual copy-pasting process for Odd Pears, while also giving them instant courier quotes in one central place. 

Odd Pears automated their parcel labelling process

Odd Pears wanted to limit their reliance on copy-pasting customer information during the fulfilment process. Not only was this incredibly time consuming, but it resulted in errors and increasing customer complaints. 

With Shippit, Odd Pears has access to multiple courier quotes and they have the ability to bulk generate and print shipping labels. All tracking information is automatically synced with Shopify, slashing the time they spend on shipping by 50%. 

Brock states:

“Now we can spend the time we spent on shipping on social media and marketing.”

Odd Pears has more time to generate new sales

“The amount of time we instantly saved in the fulfilment process was amazing.”

Brock states that as new online shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday becoming more and more popular, they have the peace of mind knowing they can increase sales during these holidays without worrying about slow and cumbersome fulfilment times. 

“We now have more time to increase our social media following, we can spend more time on our creative and we can spend more time generating sales through Instagram Stories.” 

Looking to slash the time you spend shipping orders? Book a time with our solutions experts to learn about the solutions Shippit offered Odd Pears.