Sophia: 

Hello, and welcome to the MintSoft and Wayfair webinar. On today's call, we're going to be talking about five ways to save time and money as an online seller. As an online seller, you have so many different things to manage and take care of, from stock control to managing your listings on several different channels, to invoicing, marketing, and not to mention dealing with various warehouses or suppliers. It can be extremely time-consuming, costly, and extremely stressful. 

On today's call, we're going to be talking about ways in which to save time and money to keep fundamental things as an online seller. So, on today's agenda, we'll have an introduction to meet the guests who will be discussing this topic with you. Today, we'll run through the benefits of improving your order fulfillment processes. 

We'll then discuss those five key ways to save time and money for online sellers. And finally, discuss the MintSoft and Wayfair partnership. I’m Sophia Sadra. I'm Head of Product Marketing for MintSoft, which is part of the Access Group, and I'll be hosting today's webinar alongside Rob Hodgson, who's a warehouse e-commerce and online fulfillment industry lead here at MintSoft. So, Rob, can you tell us more about yourself? 

Rob:  

Yes, of course. Nice to see you, Sophia. So I've been working within the warehousing, logistics online fulfillment industry space, for the last 17 years. So very, very pleased to say I've had the pleasure of helping hundreds and hundreds of our existing customers over that, over that period of time. And I've spent the last 12 years directly with the Access Group, and really been, you know, pleased to see how much the business has grown and how much we've been able to help with our solution stack in that time. 

Sophia: 

Fantastic. And finally, we'll have Michelle Drummond, who is the partnership manager for Wayfair., 

So, let's get into it then. This chart represents selling online in 2023. We have the number of people online, which is in the billions from 2020, and estimating on the same trajectory of growth, the amount of customers that will be online in 2025. 

There's no doubt that we've all become tech savvy in some way or another, be it working from home, buying most of our items online, which is obviously seen a reduction on high street shopping and the number of retail stores closing down. I saw a quote from Statista, which stated that in the United Kingdom, so just the UK alone, over 80% of the population makes e-commerce purchases, or to put it in other words, there's four in five of every UK consumers are digital buyers, which is a fantastic number and offers great opportunity in this market. But on the other hand, it also sees huge demand, which means the number of sellers is also growing, which means more competition. 

So, costs are also on the rise, not just in the supermarket and our petrol pumps, but packaging and the effects on shipping and delivery costs. As we know, our time is precious. 

And so, the more we can do to focus in the right areas on the biggest wins, the better. So, with this huge demand of customers and with this huge response in sellers selling online, it's the fight for who can offer the best price the quickest delivery times, and ultimately increased pressure to offer consumers a great experience. 

The e-commerce industry is growing 23% year over year. So, getting it right first time with consumers is more important now than ever with the ease of returns or cancellations for customers to rebuy quite easily through another online seller. 

So now we've looked at the market we are in and the demand that puts an online sellers. What can online sellers do to help support them through their online journey? 

We're gonna look at the benefits of improving your order fulfillment. The three points for us to discuss today is, number one, saving money by making your processes more efficient. Number two, by gaining more time to spend an important task that drive the business forward. 

And number three, giving customers a great experience and increased customer loyalty so they keep on coming back. So, Rob, what benefits do you find businesses experience when they embrace automation? And can you talk me through any examples of customers you've worked with and who and how they've managed to do this? 

Rob: 

Yeah, sure. By all means. I think the first thing to say with automation is there's many levels when it comes down to that question of automation. 

So a lot of the customers that we will speak to who are starting out in business, you know, maybe automation for them is throwing that spreadsheet in the virtual bin and and moving on to a proper system to help 'em control inventory and manage their orders in a more effective way. So really that's that first step on the journey of automation. It's stopped with the manual processes, stopped throwing bodies at things. 

Sophia: 

Absolutely. 

Rob: 

Now that's the, you know, that kind of marketplace is people who are, you know, new to the market, is people who are potentially have only got one or two products that, you know, as they expand their product portfolio, they suddenly go, ah, right, okay, we need, we need something more. So that's that first step on the ladder. The other end of the scale, I mean, a recent customer that we've been working with based out in, they are just now implementing AMRs, which are autonomous mobile robots. So you may have seen videos of these, these are the little robots that kind of scurrying around the floor. 

They will pick up the shelving unit and bring that back to a picker, so that completely stops them, people walking around the warehouse. So somebody stood still, the product is coming to them. 

So, there's many levels of automation and, you know, and of course there's a halfway house with that. But things like things like barcode scanning to improve your accuracy, understanding who did what and when, give you that full level of traceability within that warehousing environment. 

You know, it's a huge game changer for a lot of business. It improves the customer experience. It gives you yourselves a better night's sleep because you are confident that you're not overall under over ordering or under ordering in terms of stock. 

So yeah, in terms of that whole automation piece, it's a different thing for everybody. But pleased to say that, you know, we've, we've helped people right along that journey from just getting off Excel step one through to, you know, let's look at completely autonomous handling of goods, which is quite exciting stuff at the moment, I must say. 

Sophia: 

Absolutely. That's brilliant. Thanks Rob. So, Moving on to our next slide here. How does centralizing order management save time and money, and what does this actually mean? 

Rob: 

So, when we talk about order management there, there's a couple of trends of thought with this. If you are in a B2B type environment, if you are selling wholesale order management to, you may mean different prices to different customers. 

And that was a very traditional way of selling. And, you know, certainly something that I've got a lot of experience of over the years, but certainly in the last 10 years or so, as you know, rightly, as you've said, Sophia, with this shift and the growth of e-commerce, that order management piece and what it means has changed. So very often, or the vast majority of the time, things are prepaid. So first of all, you've got, you've got that element that's taken away. People aren't having to chase debt in the same way for an existing customer account in this B2C online e-commerce market. So everything's prepaid, you know, that's step one. The second thing with order management is lots and lots of our consumers are our customers, and lots of online retailers will take advantage of multiple platforms. So, you know, the likes of Wayfair, they may also have their own website. 

So what they've got to be very, very careful of with order management is, you know, are they taking an order via the Wayfair platform, which is obviously reaching millions of people, but have they also got a smaller, you know, niche where they are actually taking occasional orders on their own website as well. Now, what we've gotta be really careful of as online retailers is something we've just sold on Wayfair is not also then sold on our own website.So, you know, that in itself, that whole order management piece and linking all of those things together and having a single point of truth for stock, we'll do a couple of things. 

So, in terms of saving time and money, ordinarily, what people would have to do is they would have to log onto multiple platforms, either marketplaces like Wayfair or their own website platforms, and ensure that every time something is sold, they've then got to go onto this other platform to update the stock figure. Well, that whole process can easily be automated. So, by having one central stock for inventory, like MintSoft, you have that ability to sell one over there, de-list it over there because you're now out of stock. And, what does that do? As well as listing the product and taking orders back for that product. It means two things really. It means you're not gonna be overselling product. And you're gonna be improving that customer experience. Cause you've not got to have that awkward conversation to say, I'm sorry, you know, that that thousand pound you've just sent for that lovely new sofa, bedroom suite, or whatever it may be, we're gonna have to refund to you because we haven't actually got it in stock. Which of course, you know, lower of averages says you have a negative experience, you're more inclined to go and absolutely tell people about it, you know, positive experience. Well, that's kind of what you expected in the first place. So, so that's, that's really, really key. That's really key.  

Sophia:  

Brilliant. So Rob, can you tell us a bit more about courier selection and why it's so important?  

Rob:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, there's a couple of parts to this really. 

First of all, choosing the right courier for your business and the type of product that you effectively source and sell is paramount. We've all had the experience where something's been thrown over the fence, something's been left in the garden to get wet you know, with smaller items, you know, it happens. And different couriers serve different purposes. Yes, some for very fast-moving low value items perfectly, you know, perfectly fine but for higher value items, for things that need more traceability in terms of every step of the way maybe somebody needs to be in to take the delivery. So especially with things like furniture you know, it's not something that can be left on the doorstep as could something low value from, you know, from a different marketplace or something like that. So that's the first thing. It's actually picking the courier. Second thing is negotiating with couriers. So, in terms of the volumes that you have and the volumes that you you can put through different carrier networks you know, are you better taking all of your volume and putting that through a single carrier, or are you better actually having multiple carrier accounts and spreading that a little bit? 

Chances are you won't get as good of rate with that particular carrier, but you are de-risking if there's ever a problem with that particular carrier sorting center or, you know, like with the recent Royal Mail strikes, people really needed to find an alternative very, very quickly.  

And then the third thing would be how you actually end up selecting that carrier. So yeah,it might be a manual decision. So, when you come through, you might have a really good team that have been there for a long time and they see the order and they just know it's over a certain weight or it's over a certain size. So, it's just gonna make sense to send it on courier A, whereas what we can offer and what other platforms in the market, you know, may be able to support is this idea of courier selection. So depending on the size of the order, depending on the weight of the order, depending on the value of the order and where the order's gonna go to, rather than somebody in the warehouse team who may be very new into the business, maybe a temporary member of staff, rather than them having to think about what is the best value service or the most appropriate service to send this on, the system can automatically reroute that through and ensure that the right carrier label is printed for the right carrier, for the right product, for the order. That’s come through.  

And then just finally on that piece when you are starting off in, in the e-commerce market, it may be that the volumes are at such a level whereby you don't actually warrant or need a direct account with one of the carriers. And there are lots of good carrier aggregators out there who basically wholesale, buy carrier services and then resell those onto smaller businesses, doing lesser volumes to give you some of those benefits that some of the bigger outputs have got. And again, if that's something that you are looking for, by all means, reach out to us and we can certainly make some recommendations of who to speak to. 

Sophia: 

Absolutely. Well, it takes us on quite nicely actually, Rob, to our next slide and our next question, which is about the traceability piece, which I know you just touched on. So, we all know as consumers, we expect instant updates and absolute clarity on our orders. So how on earth do small and medium multichannel retailers deal with that? 

Rob: 

It's tough, isn't it? I mean, the big boys so to speak, you know, the Nexts of the world and you know, Amazon and people like this, we've been spoiled. We've been spoiled over the years with this idea that, you know, we should have instant responses. You know, we're a very instant culture these days. Just generally, you know, the minute you place an order, crikey, if you haven't got that email in your inbox within a few minutes, you're panicking. You know, has the order been receded? Has it been received? You know, it's this idea of traceability, is it.  

There's two parts really. It's traceability of the actual stock that you've got within the warehouse and making sure that things are tracked correctly. And therefore, the output of that is making sure the inventory position of what you have in the warehouse is correct. And that's obviously fundamental. 

It's making sure that you're not selling things you haven't got. And it's also making sure that you're not being inefficient. I've been to many warehouses over the years and, you know, a common sight before we go in and hopefully help them with some of the problems we try and solve, is what I call, the head in the air. So it's people walking around, hands behind the back looking like they're out for an afternoon stroll, but you know, they're not. They're looking around for something because they can't find the stock. So, this traceability, finding where the stock should be quickly and having a system to support that is really, really key. Now, the wider view of the world, again, the couriers can really help these smaller sized businesses as well as a good software platform provide that same experience as, you know, somebody like a next.com whereby, you know, you get all the updates, you get the dispatch details, you get that ID from that courier that comes to say, you know, thank you Mr. Hodgson, your order is on its way. Here is the link. You know, we are replicating that experience, whether you are processing 10 orders a day or 10,000 orders a day or more. And again, that journey, we can help take people through that. 

Sophia: 

That's fantastic. Brilliant. So online selling comes with a never-ending to-do list, as we know, and as we've touched on a lot of those points already. So how can outsourcing that fulfillment help then, Rob? 

Rob: 

So, this is an area we get heavily involved in. Over the years, you know, the third party logistics industry, the the fulfillment centers, they've changed massively once upon a time they were what we would call trucks and sheds. It was built, it was not a glamorous industry, it was a racking, it was forklift trucks, it was four walls and a building, and it was space for hire. These operations have transformed beyond all recognition. You know, these are highly sophisticated, technology-driven organisations using platforms like MintSoft who are selling not only their services, their expertise and experience in warehousing and fulfillment, they are also providing software platforms to their clients through the platforms that we can support and provide. So, what this does is it takes away a headache. It depends very much on the industry that people work in. Is there a premium to pay for outsourcing this headache of fulfilling your orders and storing your stock? Yes, of course.  

You know, people will always say, well, we can do it cheaper ourselves, but what is the real cost of doing it yourselves without the experience? It's like any, you know, can use any number of analogies, but there's always somebody that will do it cheaper. But if you get it wrong, what happens to your Trustpilot rating? What happens to those customer reviews? Are you gonna get referrals and repeat orders? Whereas, you know, what you should be looking for an outsourcing center is people handling similar type of product with a similar type of portfolio. Can they handle the volume that we're talking about with, with the type of business that you are now, this really helps, especially businesses which are very brand led, so very brand led businesses? You know, they should be spending most of their time, on the social media, on TikTok, on Instagram, attracting new customers, building the brand, doing all the PR side, you know, that's what these brands are great at. And then leave the, leave the fulfillment side to people that really know what they're doing. 

There's no particular big branding exercise around it, and it's more of a commodity product that happened, whether it's a niche or not. Um, you know, we do see more people doing warehousing within their own, within their own facilities, simply because there isn't the same requirement for the big brand spending, because they're not trying to build a big brand. They're just serving a market very, very well. And they're doing that, but that's really what the fulfillment industry is all about. It's about buying in expertise, buying in experience. It shouldn't just be about finding trucks, sheds and space. You know, that's a very, very old way of thinking about it. These are, you know, really key, key elements to a lot of people's businesses. And you know, people build very strong, strong partnerships off the back of them. 

Sophia: 

Absolutely. And that's really interesting stuff. Thank you so much. I suppose this just takes us to our, to our final slide then, Rob. So, if you are new to MintSoft, and you might be wondering who we are, Rob, do you want to tell us a bit more about MintSoft and how they can support? 

Rob: 

Yeah, absolutely. By all means.  

For me, Mintsoft's got a great story. So, the original developer of MintSoft started this project  about 11, 12 years ago now. It was a university project, so, he had a family member, in the southeast who was looking for a system was providing actually fulfillment services, third part logistics, warehousing, and fulfillment services. Just could not find what he was looking for in the market. So that's where, I think it started with MintSoft. And then over the last 10 years, it has grown and grown and grown. 

So at the heart of what MintSoft is and does, it is an order management, inventory management solution. We will take orders from any different channels, bring them into one place for management, pick, pack, dispatch and fulfillment. And then we, we integrate in with hundreds of online marketplaces and web platforms. Again, very popular big brand names. And we also have a huge amount of carrier integrations. 

I did laugh myself when I saw the unlimited carrier integrations, on this particular slide. So at first impressions, obviously nothing is unlimited, but actually the way we've developed this now is, we no longer have to support each individual integration. So, we have hundreds of standard native integrations, um, but what we've created is this courier portal. So if you work in an area perhaps, which is, you need a regional carrier, anything specific, which is not supported by any of the mainstream carriers, geographically, potentially you are outside of our key areas at the moment. I mean, we are now in APAC, Australia, America, throughout mainland Europe, throughout the UK. So we should have a lot of these covered, but if you have a courier that is not already pre-integrated, that can be resolved. So, it really is unlimited couriers providing the couriers are willing to link into the system and allow you to put the volume through them. 

So, that's who MintSoft are. We've got thousands of customers that we work with, but hundreds of thousands of users who are relying and supporting on MintSoft to you know, to supply their software and fulfill their requirements. And then of course, no PowerPoint would be complete without happy customer. But no, in all seriousness, there are hundreds of thousands of users out there or certainly tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands and a really good user community.  

Most of our business comes through referrals.And as you can see from Michael at Deans of Huntley, you know, we can make a really big impression on these businesses, save them a huge amount of time and money and allow them to really grow and achieve the things they want to do. Taking away these boring manual labor, repetitive processes, you know, let the software do that. You focus on running the business.  

Sophia: 

Definitely. That's brilliant. Thanks so much, Rob. 

So, we're joined by Michelle, who's the Partnership Manager at Wayfair. Michelle, can you tell us a bit more about how you feel the partnership benefits Wayfair suppliers?  

Michelle: 

Yes, thank you Sophia. And thank you Rob for all the information and the transparency. 

I actually learned a lot today as well, that's amazing. Again, my name is Michelle Drummond and my position within Wayfair is partnership manager for the EU region. Why we choose Minsoft is to help upscale the EU region with a solution which we trust. And MintSoft is a reliable OMS/WMS, like order management and warehouse management system. As you heard briefly from Rob, the history of MintSoft is very something where we could stand for and back up as well because it was very interesting to hear it's coming from a student who did the research behind it, how to help our e-commerce to grow and be better.  

As well the strong partnership between us where we can trust and respect each other, talking about optimization for standards was very important. Then just briefly, I’ll go in to where to find the solution in our partner marketplace. So, you can find a MintSoft solution in your partner home under developer partner marketplace. And then you can choose either the order processing bucket or the warehouse management bucket. Choose EU region and you will find MintSoft for more details or get in direct contact with them. Thank you again for the webinar today. As mentioned,I learned today a lot. And thank you for organizing everything.  

Sophia: 

Thank you so much, Michelle. Thank you.  

So thank you everybody for joining us today. If you do have any questions, as Michelle said, or would like to discuss anything that's been raised on the webinar, please do reach out to either Rob directly or Michelle who'll be happy to support with any queries or further information. Thank you.