Customer Success Story: Webzom.com
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What started as a hobby has become a thriving business with 20 employees and tens of thousands of shipments a month.
How did Webzom.com get started?
Husband and wife team Brad and JoAnne King of Webzom.com, a premium apparel company, started selling merchandise on eBay in approximately 2004. “Initially, online selling was a hobby for my wife,” said Brad, President and Co-Founder of Webzom.com. “She would find a good price on an item, like a designer purse, and then purchase three of them. She would keep one for herself and sell the other two on eBay.”
In 2006, the couple left their corporate careers and put their full energy into Webzom.com. Their focus paid off. The company has gone from working out of their home to a 15,000-square-foot warehouse where apparel inventory management and shipping automation have become critical to daily operations.
How do you manage the shipping and inventory?
Behind-the-scenes of Webzom’s success are SkuVault for managing inventory and ShipWorks for automating shipping. According to Brad, “With both of them, we’ve cut our labor costs related to picking and shipping by over 30 percent.”
SkuVault by AgileHarbor and ShipWorks are fully integrated with each other, and both provide connectivity to Channel Advisor, the popular e-commerce marketplace management system. SkuVault processes all items coming into the warehouse, and warehouse workers receive orders and real-time quantity updates. Picklists are printed and grouped together by location so that warehouse workers are able to complete an order in the most efficient way. Once items are picked and prepared for packaging, SkuVault verifies the contents of each order for accuracy. ShipWorks completes the process by automating tasks such as printing shipping labels, sending tracking information to the buyer, providing shipping insurance, and updating the online status of each order.
What are the results of using ShipWorks and SkuVault?
Ask Brad his opinion of SkuVault and ShipWorks and he has only positive things to say.
“Before finding SkuVault, all of the inventory systems we looked at were either too expensive or too simplistic,” said Brad. “Their inventory system is easy and makes things much more convenient. One of the biggest changes we’ve noticed is how it has drastically reduced the sale of items we did not have in stock. Prior to working with SkuVault we had to cancel about 1.5% of our orders because we no longer had the item or we could not locate the item in the warehouse. Within 3 months of working with SkuVault that number was reduced to about 0.5%.”
“ShipWorks is a necessity, and it’s a bargain,” said Brad. “It’s a no-brainer that if you’re going to ship a large quantity of items, you have to have ShipWorks.”