Shipium co-founder Jason Murray is all about replicating an Amazon-like experience for shippers, having spent 19 years there helping shape its supply chain and inventory optimization technology, and now uses stochastic data science and predictive modeling to deliver better SLAs and cost savings.
“The technology I worked on at Amazon was around inventory positioning, order flow management, transparency to the customer and the delivery promise,” Murray said at the NRF Big Show Monday. “It included multi-carrier arbitrage, a wide network of carriers and understanding their performance. The concept now is to bring this kind of tech-enabled supply chain for ecommerce to the rest of the retail market.”
So far, Shipium, founded in 2019, has provided this capability for discount luxury apparel retailer Saks Off Fifth, cleaning and beauty products seller Grove Collective and some 3PLs he’s not at liberty to name. He said Saks has gone from onboarding one new carrier per quarter with its legacy shipping solution, to eight per quarter with Shipium; it has also introduced a guaranteed delivery date program. Another customer with 2.1 million shipments last year realized $2.9 million in savings.
Last year, Shipium became one of CommerceHub’s partners on its delivery suite offering, along with project44 and parcelLab.
While the current economic doldrums has led to a slowdown in deal flow, Murray said the company has been emphasizing the cost savings aspect in an era of risk aversion by corporate finance heads.
“There’s a lot of volatility in the world right now, a lot more interest in cost savings but also risk avoidance,” he said. “So, our messaging is around, we can gives you a lot more protection from volatility, whether one carrier stops taking orders or another has a hub that shuts down.”
A lot of data-intensive shipping and fulfillment tech startups at NRF talked about the critical importance of shortening the time to value equation for retail and ecommerce shippers in this difficult environment, and Shipium is singing from that song sheet as well.
“As a tech-forward company that’s data heavy, the more companies running on Shipium, the larger the dataset, the greater the ability to increase predictability,” Murray said. “As those pieces get better, we’ll be introducing new products.” A fulfillment engine to route orders in real time among multiple nodes in a cost-based manner is planned for the latter half of 2023.