New York, April 28, 2020 — The winners of Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards were announced today, honoring the businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to flattening the curve when it comes to the climate crisis, social injustice, or economic inequality.

New York, April 28, 2020 — The winners of Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards were announced today, honoring the businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to flattening the curve when it comes to the climate crisis, social injustice, or economic inequality.

Cahoot is an eCommerce order fulfillment network that helps online businesses offer nationwide free 1-day and 2-day delivery to its customers at no additional costs. It cuts down the distance packages need to travel by having nearby businesses store and ship products for each other. So instead of flying packages by air long-distance to customers, merchants can ship via economical and greener ground shipping. In 2019 alone, Cahoot has cut down more than 2 million miles of carbon emissions for its network members. Also, Cahoot’s peer-to-peer model allows merchants to offset storage and fulfillment costs by fulfilling orders for each other. Therefore, every merchant on the platform can ship locally and beat fast shipping standards with better margins. This year, Cahoot is awarded Honorable Mentions for The Best World Changing Idea in North America and the Experimental category.

Now in its fourth year, the World Changing Ideas Awards showcase 26 winners, more than 200 finalists, and more than 500 honorable mentions—with Health and Wellness, Corporate Social Responsibility, and AI and Data among the most popular categories. A panel of eminent judges selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 3,000 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, and more. The 2020 awards feature entries from across the globe, from Vancouver to Singapore to Tel Aviv.

Illustrating how some of the world’s most inventive entrepreneurs and companies are addressing grave global challenges, Fast Company’s May/June issue celebrates, among others, an electric engine for airplanes that eliminates emissions from flights—and expensive fuel from the tricky financial calculus of the airline industry; a solar-powered refrigerator that finally frees people in remote villages from daily treks to distant markets, transforming the economics of those households; an online marketplace that connects food companies with farms to buy ugly and surplus produce to fight waste; and an initiative to offset all of the carbon costs of shipping, creating a new model for e-commerce sustainability.

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Cahoot aims to continue making the world a greener place while leveling the playing field in eCommerce. “The key to sustainable one-day delivery is having fulfillment centers close to customers and shipping them cheaply using ground services,” says Manish Chowdhary, founder and CEO of Cahoot. “It is near impossible for smaller brands to build a distribution network to compete on a level playing field. We need to change the game. We can’t work in siloes building our own facilities trying to compete against Amazon. The only way forward is to work together.”

“There seems no better time to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, resources, and, in some cases, their scale to tackle society’s biggest problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of senior editor Morgan Clendaniel, have uncovered some of the smartest and most inspiring projects of the year.”

About the World Changing Ideas Awards: World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honorable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With a goal of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.

Written By:

Jeremy Stewart

Jeremy Stewart leads customer success at Cahoot, helping merchants achieve high-performance logistics through smart technology and process optimization. With a background in both ecommerce operations and client services, Jeremy ensures that every merchant using Cahoot gets measurable results—whether they’re scaling from one warehouse to many or managing complex returns.

Marketplace Sellers Leverage Peer-to-Peer Fulfillment to Grow Sales with Affordable Nationwide Fast Shipping.

BRIDGEPORT, CT (August 30, 2021) – Cahoot, the world’s first peer-to-peer eCommerce fulfillment network, announced its partnership and integration with Walmart (NYSE: WMT). Cahoot is now a certified shipping and fulfillment solution for Walmart’s marketplace sellers.

Cahoot’s revolutionary peer-to-peer fulfillment model enables brands and online retailers to affordably provide one-day and two-day delivery nationwide. With its rapidly growing network of eCommerce order fulfillment centers coast-to-coast, Cahoot is quickly becoming the fulfillment provider of choice for high-volume sellers on marketplaces such as Walmart, Amazon, and eBay and eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.

“We’re excited to integrate with Walmart ahead of the record-breaking holiday season just around the corner,” said Cahoot Founder and CEO Manish Chowdhary. “The industry’s rapid growth has fulfillment capacity bursting at the seams. Our novel peer-to-peer model solves this problem by unlocking thousands of eCommerce merchants’ excess warehouse space and fulfillment capacity. Collectively, the Cahoot network is doing for eCommerce fulfillment what Airbnb did for lodging.”  

A Reliable Solution for Walmart’s Free 2-Day Delivery Program

Cahoot’s Walmart Marketplace Integration enables approved sellers to participate in Walmart’s 2-Day delivery program and display the Free 2-day shipping badge on their marketplace listings. Walmart has observed that sellers with this badge enjoy an up to 50% increase in conversion, making it one of the most powerful ways sellers can grow their sales. To help merchants delight their customers with exceptional delivery experience, Cahoot provides affordable same-day fulfillment 6 to 7 days a week and maintains a strict service level agreement of 99.95% on-time fulfillment and 99.9% order accuracy. 

Flexible Across Channels & Works Seamlessly with In-House Operations

The patented Cahoot eCommerce order fulfillment platform provides eCommerce merchants with unsurpassed ease of use and complete visibility into inventory, orders, fulfillment performance, and package tracking – across all sales channels. Unlike traditional 3PL networks, the Cahoot network can seamlessly integrate with existing merchant fulfillment, which upgrades their strategy without introducing more complexity. With Cahoot, orders automatically flow to the optimal shipping point, whether it’s a Cahoot fulfillment center or the merchant’s own warehouse. 

Cahoot has really helped us grow our multi-channel sales. We use Cahoot to fulfill our Walmart 2-Day orders and our Amazon standard and SFP orders. In addition to saving us money, we really like that their software and their fulfillment network work seamlessly with our own in-house fulfillment operations. Our old 3PL couldn’t do that.

Kris Koesema
Battery Jack

The Power of Many

Like the Airbnb marketplace of homeowners and travelers, the patented Cahoot order fulfillment network brings together the collective power of SMBs and their warehouses to fulfill orders, thus reducing fulfillment costs and expediting delivery. 

Cahoot is available for merchants looking to expand their reach for one- and two-day delivery services across all selling channels, including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Shopify, BigCommerce, and more. Merchants can reach a Cahoot fulfillment expert at www.Cahoot.ai.

ABOUT CAHOOT

Cahoot is the world’s first peer-to-peer eCommerce fulfillment network. It helps online businesses offer nationwide 1-day and 2-day deliveries. In addition, Cahoot’s model is the lowest cost by design because it enables merchants to store and ship merchandise for each other. This novel business model also allows merchants to make extra money using their existing warehouse space and personnel.

BRIDGEPORT, CT (April 14, 2021) – Cahoot, the world’s first peer-to-peer eCommerce fulfillment network, announced that it has been named on the Fast Company’s Prestigious List of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2021. Cahoot enables brands and online retailers to affordably provide one-day and two-day delivery nationwide by storing and fulfilling goods for each other.  

Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies (MIC) list honors the businesses that have not only found a way to be resilient in the past year but also turned those challenges into impact-making processes. These companies did more than just survive; they thrived—making an impact on their industries and culture as a whole. This year’s list features 463 businesses from 29 countries.

“We are honored to be named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies and recognized for our work. We are enabling businesses of any size to affordably offer their customers the same superfast delivery experience as Amazon” said Manish Chowdhary, Founder and CEO of Cahoot.

Like the Airbnb marketplace of homeowners and travelers, the patented Cahoot fulfillment network brings together the collective power of many SMBs and their warehouses to fulfill orders, thus reducing fulfillment costs and expediting delivery. Cahoot’s optimization algorithm further analyzes all combinations of warehouses, carriers, and shipping services to find the most affordable and efficient way to deliver orders fast.

With consumers flocking to online shopping in 2020 due to COVID, eCommerce grew an unprecedented 44% year-over-year, nearly three times the historical annual growth. At the height of the pandemic, even Amazon’s fulfillment services faltered. Customer orders took almost a month to arrive as warehouses struggled to fulfill orders. Amazon stopped accepting non-essential goods in its warehouses and prioritized its direct sales over those of its marketplace sellers, leaving hundreds of thousands of sellers that rely on its popular fulfillment service (FBA) scrambling for alternatives. Such incidents have caused merchants to always be prepared with a backup provider when they need it.

This eCommerce explosion has led to a shortage in warehouse space, well-priced and available labor, and carrier capacity. Warehouse vacancies reached an all-time low in Q3 2020 while rents were at an all-time high. LinkedIn also reported a surge of 73% job openings for fulfillment workers, the highest among all categories, and wages began creeping up. Moreover, all major carriers, including USPS, increased rates and added surcharges to handle the unprecedented increase in demand. All of this has resulted in much higher operational costs for retailers. And, at a time when most consumers are struggling financially, raising prices is not an option for merchants.

“Traditional solutions do not meet the needs of SMBs – unlike large corporations that have the power to negotiate aggressively with landlords and carriers to stay competitive. With Amazon pushing its popular prime membership program to transition from 2-day free delivery to now 1-day, even the largest retailers are facing logistical challenges. But Cahoot changes all that by intelligently aggregating the power of many,” said Chowdhary.

By unlocking previously unavailable warehouse capacity from tens of thousands of merchants across the U.S., Cahoot is transforming eCommerce fulfillment into a new collaborative model that’s more efficient. Cahoot’s fulfillment model is also environmentally friendly besides scaling up to meet the rising consumer expectations of free and fast delivery. And for the first time, online merchants can monetize their existing warehouse space and labor in a way previously not imagined or possible. “Before Cahoot, we didn’t really know how to leverage our extra space and fulfillment capacity. Becoming a Cahoot Fulfillment Partner has been a great way to make extra money without the hassle of becoming a full 3PL. Onboarding was fast and easy; Cahoot software is so efficient that we pick Cahoot orders before our own!” said Robert Hill, CEO of Seismic Audio Speakers.

With Cahoot, merchants can expand to regions previously too far for fast ground shipping and too expensive for expedited air shipping. “My customers now expect free 1-day and 2-day delivery, which is very expensive and difficult to provide. But with Cahoot, I can now offer 1-day delivery in both the East and the West with ground shipping, in addition to my home state of Kentucky,” said Darren Somerville of Impact Battery.  

By providing fulfillment as a utility-like service as opposed to a competitive advantage previously available only to the largest and highly capitalized corporations, Cahoot aims to fuel even greater innovation – sure to benefit consumers around the world.

“Before Cahoot, we were selling only on Amazon. The inventory restrictions imposed by Amazon FBA were difficult for my business,” said Eli Miller, owner of Twinkle Toy. “Cahoot helped us grow by serving customers nationwide across multiple selling channels, including our own website. It’s a whole new opportunity that I would never have had without Cahoot.”

Cahoot’s shipping volume increased five-fold year-over-year in 2020. Many merchants have found success through Cahoot: 

• A chocolatier in Brooklyn, NY, added 34% more sales just by outsourcing fulfillment to 2 additional locations.
• A prominent battery merchant in the Midwest maintained their Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime eligibility by expanding 1-day ground coverage to 45%+ of U.S. consumers.
• Another merchant selling big, bulky products saved 88% on two-day delivery costs and tripled sales in just three weeks.

Fast Company’s editors and writers sought out the most groundbreaking businesses across the globe and industries. The World’s Most Innovative Companies is Fast Company’s signature franchise and one of its most highly anticipated editorial efforts of the year. It provides both a snapshot and a road map for the future of innovation across the most dynamic sectors of the economy.  

Cahoot is available for merchants looking to expand their reach for one- and two-day delivery services across all popular selling channels, including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Shopify, BigCommerce, and more. Merchants can reach a Cahoot fulfillment expert at www.Cahoot.ai

ABOUT CAHOOT
Cahoot is the world’s first peer-to-peer eCommerce fulfillment network that helps online businesses offer nationwide 1-day and 2-day deliveries. Cahoot offers drastically lower fulfillment fees because it enables merchants to store and ship the merchandise for each other. This novel business model also enables merchants to make extra money using their existing warehouse space and personnel.

ABOUT FAST COMPANY
Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies issue (March/April 2021) is now available online here, on iTunes, and on newsstands beginning March 16, 2021