Excelling In eCommerce Logistics With “Adapt or Die” Author Jeremy Bodenhamer - Episode 190
INTERVIEW WITH JEREMY BODENHAMER
DESCRIPTION
This week on the eCommerce Braintrust podcast we’re joined by Jeremy Bodenhamer, best-selling author of “Adapt or Die”. This book is your survival guide to modern warehouse automation, and gives us insight into order fulfillment, not as an afterthought, but as a strategic moat for your company and how you can compete with marketplace giants like Amazon.
Make sure to tune in to find out more!
Jeremy Bodenhamer is the bestselling author of “Adapt or Die”, Co-founder and CEO of ShipHawk, shipping software for volume shippers. He is a leading expert at the intersection of shipping and commerce, has been featured in TechCrunch, AOL, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Internet Retailer, Inc., and Entrepreneur. Jeremy is a frequent speaker on innovation, technology, and business development. He is an active volunteer in the community, an avid CrossFitter, and lives in Santa Barbara with his wife, educator, and youth advocate Bethany Bodenhamer, and their three sons.
“The goal isn’t to avoid robots. The goal is to invest in people. It’s the people who make your business work. It’s the people who invent, improve and create.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The first part of the book sets the stage and makes the business case of why we focus on logistics and order fulfillment as a strategic advantage for your company. The second part goes point by point into focus areas like tactical things to do, and areas to investigate, and checklists, and case studies.
There are two parts to marketplaces, the eyeballs side (the place where everyone goes shopping), and the distribution side.
There is a Big Five in “Adapt or die”, the five APIs of the apocalypse, and this group is made up of Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba, JD COMM, and Shopify.
The challenge to independent merchants is that smaller sellers have to meet the same buyer expectations with far fewer resources.
Prior to COVID, Amazon was on a track to chase down one-day shipping and make that available across a large part of their assortment. This can be more difficult and expensive than two-day of shipping - it's not just the cost from a shipping perspective to get the orders out, but it's also the distribution centers, and how many of those distribution centers are needed to service the geography the size of the United States and that timeframe.
Density is the key to success for Amazon and its competitors.
Instacart solves density problems through its model - by aggregating orders from multiple retailers, they're able to achieve route density, whereas just one retailer on their own is not able to do that.
Most B2C businesses lose somewhere between two and 5% of net sales on shipping expenses. Carrier and service routing is one of the biggest offenders of errors and 22.3% of orders that were analyzed were shipped with the wrong carrier or service.
Environmental nightmare: 40% of shipments are shipped in a box that's too large for its contents, carriers address this with dimensional pricing, which can add 25% or more to the baseline shipping costs. In the US, overpacking put 25 million additional truckloads on the road each year, and we're cutting down a billion trees each year for cardboard for these boxes.
There are six critical components around mastering warehouse automation: shipping, packaging, warehousing, data and analytics, robotics and ops workers.
We shouldn’t be drowning in data. Keep it simple, start small.
By 2018, the average warehouse SKUs count was over 14,000 items, and of those 14,000 SKUs, only 43% of those could be handled robotically.
The answer is to invest in automation, but also to invest in the workers themselves, invest in training, improve benefits, and treat the back office like we do the workers in the front office.
One reason eCommerce is so expensive is because of distribution cost. This is a place where ShipHawk steps in to help customers, and help them use those complicated tariffs to select the right box, the right carrier, the right service that optimizes both cost and transit times. Those savings and efficiencies go straight to the bottom line which is important across all channels.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Connect with Kiri Masters
Connect with Jeremy Bodenhamer
Learn more about Bobsled Marketing
Learn more about Jeremy’s work
Learn more about ShipHawk