Case Study – Virtual Exchanges

Virtual exchanges got themselves into a bind by using a temporary workaround for a growing problem. Virtual Exchanges has been around for a long time. They have been using RetailOps for their Warehouse Management System and Order Management, and everything was going smoothly until Virtual Exchanges expanded their offering to Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP). Unfortunately, their current system did not support buying shipping labels from Amazon Buy Shipping, which is mandatory for SFP orders. To work around this limitation, they used Shipworks as a secondary shipping software. The two software do not integrate well, which result in lots of manual processing. Every day they had to take their Amazon SFP orders into Shipworks and process them separately, and then manually update inventory counts.

Their quick workaround for SFP orders was painful but manageable. However, they have grown from their humble beginnings to shipping more than 1,000 orders per week all over the globe. And their rapid growth made these SFP orders more and more of a pain for their operations. Their team needed a lot of manual effort to synchronize their warehouse operations and shipping label generation across the two systems. The manual steps in disconnected processes were extremely time-consuming and inefficient, which drained the merchant’s already limited human resources.

Moreover, Virtual Exchanges was leaving money on the table because RetailOps does not provide an easy way to compare shipping rates for the merchant’s orders. This limited their ability to figure out which shipping service was best for each order. Shipworks offers some rate shopping tools that can help spot the cheapest rates, but each order using it creates a ton of manual work. Neither option is ideal for Virtual Exchanges.