Good morning everyone. My name is Sean Barbera. I'm the director of marketing here at Navigator Business Solutions. Today I have Gary from Alluvia and Mark from ShipStation. We're all excited to have them present this intelligent shipping integration with SAP Business One. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Gary. Take it away.
Thanks Sean. Hello everyone. Today we're going to show you a little overview of Alluvia platform and then jump right into information regarding the ShipStation integration, followed by Mark who will be actually doing a deeper dive into ShipStation. So today we're gonna focus on what is the Alluvia platform shipping with ShipStation, followed by our demonstration and finally a Q&A session. So to start the Alluvia integration platform. So today's environment when we're implementing ERP can become quite complex with all these different systems trying to communicate back to SAP Business One. And as a result, you have to manage them all and have to manage all these separate integrations provided by separate integration partners. But with the Alluvia platform, we can simplify this through a unified integration solution, integrating all your external systems through one platform by one provider. So our areas of expertise includes EDI, E-Commerce, marketplace Channels, CRM, Logistics, which we will be focusing on today, procurement and spend management and banking. So little about ShipStation. Shipstation is a fulfillment management platform that streamlines and automates the shipping process, offering discounted shipping rates on the great services you already use. It's shipping software for whatever you sell, however you ship. And when you click on the See Partners link, you'll see it brings you to the Alluvia section of the ShipStation site where it highlights the Alluvia integration solution.
And the solution that we provide flows something like this. So you have orders coming into SAP from possibly Shopify or Amazon or Big Commerce or Woo. The order arrives into SAP through the Alluvia platform. We send that to ShipStation. Shipstation ships the goods. We receive the shipment confirmation along with the tracking information and we send that up to the e-commerce site. And while that's the most common scenario today, we're really focusing on this aspect of the solution where the order flows from SAP to Shipstation and ShipStation back, but your environment looks more something more closely resembling this with the whole e-commerce site integrating through our platform to sap, then to shipstation back from ShipStation and then back to your e-commerce site.
So breaking it down by process flow, the SAP sales order is created, uploaded to the Alluvia platform, then sent to ShipStation so the order can be processed and shipped. The shipping label is created and confirmation. We upload that along with the tracking information to create the delivery note. Finally, in SAP Business One. And now onto our product demonstration, we'll be focusing on three screens during the demo. The Alluvia portal, which contains some transactions in the queue shipstation where we've created an SAP test store with no transactions, an SAP Business One. So now we will begin by creating two orders within SAP and process them through the Alluvia portal to Shipstation where we will ship the goods, then send it back through the Alluvia portal, and ultimately creating the delivery note along with the tracking information in SAP selected by selecting the customer.
And then the items. Once the items are created, we select a quantity, go to the shipping tab where we can see the shipping address associated with this customer. And then we go ahead and we can add it. Now we go in and create a second order selecting the customer, the dates, and then go on to selecting the items on this order. For this order, we're gonna add two line items, one with a quantity of two and the second with a quantity of one. And we're gonna go ahead and add the order first, checking the logistics tab and then adding the order. Now we're switching to Alluvia portal. We see there's nine rows here. We're gonna go refresh it and the 10th row will come in where we see the new shipstation order ready to post.
And then we're gonna refresh it again and it's gonna switch to on posting where we see here and we're going to see the new order. So now the second of the orders came in ready to post and the first order is successful. So now we're gonna flip to ShipStation, we're gonna refresh the screen and here we see the order that said posted successfully is sitting here in shipstation ready to process. You select the order, we can see the order details with the ship to information, we can enter the weight, how we want it to ship.
Brings in the rate, print the label and it's shipped. And there we see the tracking number ending with 0 0 2 7. We can now close that order, reload. And now we see the second order sitting in the shipping solution and we're gonna leave that there. Now flip back to the Alluvia portal and we can see both were successfully posted to ShipStation. We'll now refresh this screen and now we see one came in to post back to SAP, but this order has a status of failed. Let's see why. So we're gonna drill into the transaction and now we're gonna go into the document process and we can say see the reason why it failed. And in this case it's because there's a missing exchange rate and that is because the ship date was in a new accounting period and we had not entered the corresponding new exchange rate within SAP Business One.
So now I'll go ahead and I'll switch over to SAP I need to update the exchange rate. So I'll look up the exchange rate and here it is, I'll expand it. I'm gonna select March because that's the period that I need to update. And I'll enter in the exchange rate update and I can switch back to the portal and I can see that it's still failed. So I'm going to change it to ready to post reprocess. The order says it's on posting and successful back into SAP and I see my sales orders delivered is undelivered, is two, and now it changed to one and number of open deliveries to one. So here I can go in, I can see the order that was placed, the logistics tab, and now you'll see there's the tracking number, if you recall, ending with 0 0 2 7. Now I'm in the ship station where I will show you the tracking number ending with 0 0 2 7. And now I will turn it over to Mark to show us how ShipStation can help shipping speed and efficiency accuracy and your bottom line and elevated customer experience.
Perfect, thank you Gary for that. Now this is Mark here at shipStation. So what I'm gonna dive into as, as Gary said, there is a shipping speed and efficiency accuracy and your bottom line and an elevated customer experience. So we're, we're aware of this that we are in the shipping industry and shipping is, is often an afterthought of doing business and doing business online. But really there's a lot of research around this. So Harvard, Harvard Business Review, for example states that acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. So a lot of this, and these are intertwined that the speed and efficiency, the accuracy and the experience are all intertwined into keeping your delivery promise to the customer and retaining their business. So with that shipping speed and efficiency key part here is going to be looking at how we process things in bulk, how we look at automation within the system.
So I'm in, I'm in ShipStation here. I'm in the same ShipStation instance that, Gary was just demoing. And hopefully you can all see what I'm, what I'm showing here is, is the ShipStation interface where I have orders that have, that have imported, they've imported into the system. And because I've set various rules in here, these orders are actually pretty much ready to go. They've all been assigned the key pieces of information they need. If I were to open up one of these orders, you will see that I have got the key things that shipping carriers require. We know who it's going to and we've validated that address from what the customer has entered. So we know where it's going to, that the address is accurate. It's not missing any data. And whether it's residential or commercial, we know the weight of the product and it can either come from the original order source through SAP and through Alluvia to us, or you can add this within ShipStation.
We know what box size it's in, although that is actually optional for most shipping carriers. And then we also know the service they want to use and we can, we can map this in and you can look at various levels of complexity here. It can be relatively simple or say if someone's requested overnight, I'm sending that USPS priority mail express, for example. Or it could be that they've requested an exact service. So if I look at this order, for example, they've requested USPS next day early, okay, for that, that means, so UPS next day, that means UPS next day early this will be, this will be mapped into here, or we can take this a bit a bit further. And as complicated as you like with these automation rules, rules within here, I can say if someone's requested a free service and it's less than 60 ounces, then I'm sending it first class mail.
If they've requested a free service and it's more than 60 ounces in the subsequent rule, then I also choose how to, how to configure this effectively. What we're looking to get to within, within these rules is that you can have this setup. 90, 95, 99% of all of your orders are effectively ready to go. So you can come in or you can have somebody come in, especially if you're hiring seasonal labor. You can have somebody come in who doesn't need to make shipping decisions, they press the button, they choose the orders, they can hit this green button straight away and get these 69 enables printed. Or they can open up the sidebar, they can do some bulk updates, change how everything's gonna go and just hit print. And that will print you the labels automatically. You'll get the tracking numbers and the information, the tracking numbers, the price will be pushed back via Alluvia to SAP business one, where it will then be all within, within one system.
So this just allows you to work at sort of at speed then and, and efficiently. But the next panel on top of this that I wanted to talk about is then accuracy as well. So we have the ability and we have the capability if you wish to use it, to use ShipStation to do your picking and your packing as well as your shipping. If you're using a different system to pick and pack or you have a WMS you're using for this, that's absolutely fine. Please feel free to to continue to use that. But if you wish to within the ShipStation, you can print pick lists. You can also print these packing slips as well. And these can be branded to your brand and we'll come onto branding as part of that customer experience in a little bit. But a key part here is you'll see I've got a barcode on each of these.
This barcode is just this order number in barcode format. So this is why we can use it from both our system or if you're printing these packing slips from any other system, as long as we have the order number in barcode format that allows us to then run through a scan based workflow. So I scan in this order number, it pops up my order. I'm actually running this in scan to verify and print mode. So what it would like from me before it allows me to print this label is to scan either the SKU or the UPC, or actually there's a third one, the fulfillment SKU available that you can use. If you scan those or you manually verify, you can then print the label for this. You'll see also I got my weight here and the option to use a scale. I don't have a scale connected, but if I did this would be reading my live weight.
Also if you're using more advanced systems, Cuba scans and, and other dimensionalizes, it can also update the final package size as well. So this system can be scan, scan the barcode pops the order, scan the products to confirm that, correct, put it on the scale of dimensionalize, it will then update the final packed weight and final packed size. And then you hit print or you can scan a further barcode to print that label. We're just making sure that the right orders are going in the right box to the right people every single time. So making sure that that, you're hitting those delivery con those delivery reliability considerations that you have. And again, I mentioned there's a lot of research in this area. PWC research mentioned 46% of customers rank that delivery reliability and accuracy in their top consideration when they're, when they're buying online.
But, we know that sometimes mistakes do happen. And again, research around this from conveyors that three to 5% of deliveries will have an issue. And they cost you on average, to handle the query through customer service. But then 83% of those customers who have an issue won't shop with you again if they do. So putting that into really hard numbers there, if you're shipping 10,000 orders, 5% of that is 500 orders times up by $5 to, to fix each of those 500 is two and a half thousand dollars. And on top of that, 83% of those 500 customers won't return to you. So that's 415 lost customers, of your orders then. So a lot of what we try to do as well within the system is give you the ability to have that elevated customer experience. And a lot of that comes down to communication.
So within ShipStation and within the settings, and, this is available to all accounts, you have the ability to set up communication, branding, tracking, and returns. So within here I can load the branding of my of my store. Once a shipment is created, I then have the option to send out that, send out a tracking page, which will contain my brand information, my customer service number. So there's a couple of things to consider here. Most of you have probably shopped online about I'd venture. Say all of you have shopped online, most of you have probably had the experience where you are then sent a tracking number, your order has been shipped, says a says an email, you click on that tracking number and it says something very unhelpful. No, no details found, look, a awaiting package information, something like that. And you're just on the carrier's page, you're on the UPS page or the FedEx page.
Very unhelpful. And actually a significant percentage of people will then contact the merchant to, to inquire about this and say, where's my, where's my order? It says there's no details. So that's more work for you to be handling placating customers. A simple way to get around this is when do you send out these emails instead of sending it out? When the shipping label is created, you can choose to send it out when it first hits the mail stream. So when UPS or FedEx scan it into their system or U S P S puts it to a sorting office, it's them within their system. It has a location, it has an estimated delivery day that's gonna provide a much more pleasant experience for the end customer. In addition, with that branding, you can have your own tracking page as well. So instead of just sending them to the, to the carriers page, it can send it to your branded page with customer service information, information about the returns policy.
Do you turn information about what's in what's in the order instead of just that generic UPS or FedEx page? Because that link, the tracking link on the tracking page is the most visited page through the entire e-commerce purchasing process. So you want to be driving people back via links to your website, to custom websites, to your social media pages as well. So we give the option to do that for every shipment going out the door. And then what if mistakes do happen? We also want to give the ability to do a quick and seamless return. You can do that from within the system. You can give your customer service agents the ability to create returns within ShipStation. You can send out return labels with every order if you'd like, or you can have a branded tracking portal, oh, sorry, a branded returns portal as well.
Again, pushing customers back for, for further purchases while they're going through this returns process. So they need their order number and their zip code. They can look up that order, choose why they're returning something, and this is just internal for you. You can just keep a log of of, of why you're receiving these returns. Turns out the joy of doing something live fail, actually send this order out within the system. It will then actually give me a page of how to, how to repackage my my order and send them back send them back in and it would generate a, a label for them. Or alternativelywhat you can do as well is if you're within the Ship Station system, you can either generate the label as a pdf and send it to them through your customer service portal, or you can have ShipStation automatically email them that returns label. So that was a very sort of whistle stop tool that we had of kind of how do we, how do we speed up shipping, how do we get efficiency going within shipping? How do we make sure that we're we're accurately shipping? And then how do we make sure we're communicating shipping to our customers and our presentation. And hank you for watching listening, and if there's any questions to, to any of us please, please do let us know.
Yeah, fantastic. Thank you, Mark. Thank you Gary, for that quick, again, we promised an executive level webinar. We don't wanna take up everyone's day all day, but we are open to any questions that you have for Gary for Mark. I can answer some of the Navigator Business Solutions questions if there's something specific to that while we wait and see if anyone has any specific questions from the presentation. Mark, quick question for you, what is the biggest pain point that you see customer solving with ShipStation?
Oh, that's, that's a tricky one. So I'm trying to get on three of the main ones there. A lot of it is how do we, how do we handle that, that speed and efficiency? That seems to be the, the, the main gains we need. We need to process these orders quickly. We don't wanna be going through sort of click by click, but we use multiple carriers. We have multiple setups. We have some of our merchants want us to ship on their accounts. We don't want to be logging to FedEx, ship manager, ups, WorldShip separately and handling this and making sure it's going the right way. We want to handle this all within, within one system, have the same people just be able to create all these labels at once. Actually, one thing that I, I neglected to show was how you can, how you can sort, how you can filter that dashboard I was on to say I want to ship these orders first, then I want to come back and ship these orders. I want to allocate this to one person. So it's really taking, taking the pain out a bit for the, for the people who are shipping. So they don't actually have to think about shipping, they just have to make sure they're pulling the right items in the right box and getting them out the door. And then everything's ready for each carrier at a certain time of day. Create your end of late, end of day or manifest for the carriers. Again, just minimal, minimal system logging, minimal button click for, for the end user.
Great. so again, ShipStation can be used for B2C as well as B2B
To on extent. So this is a, this is a, an area where actually ShipStation excels at the small medium parcel when it comes to, to freight skids, things like that within ShipStation. We're only really looking at FedEx Freight Up s ground Freight pricing and Secco as the three carriers. However, you'll notice my email address and my company name is Octane, not just ShipStation. Octane is the parent company of ShipStation along with several other shipping brands. One of those being Ship Engine and Ship Engine can support LTL carriers and workflows and can also work with with Alluvia to integrate that into SAP Business One. So if there's a, if there's an LTL requirement or piece of your business it's a little more custom with Ship Engine but it can be built in as well.
Got it. And Gary, for, for you typical implementation time for an integration from Business One to ShipStation on average, if it's a straightforward integration from Business one to ShipStation with no crazy sideway moves, about how long does that integration take?
It's usually about the efforts, usually about a week. However, from the time you sign to the time you're live is usually three to four weeks, just, you know, getting into the queue and getting through the process. But the actual work time is about a week.
Great. So we're really, we're really talking turnkey here. A week is not long in the ERP world. We have does ShipStation work with ups, ground freight pricing Mark?
Yes it does.
So all major carriers Ship Station focused on that small to small medium size shipment. Yep. Right. As long as you're not going bulk freight. Which there seems to be an option challenge
And we touched on Mark, touched on that through the Elu portal, we actually can leverage both ShipStation and Ship Engine. Got it. So there's some things, some features that are not quite available in ShipStation, but we can then through our portal, go to ship Engine and make those features available.
Scalable Got it. Right. Scalable. The integration is scalable, the options are configurable to our clients. I don't see any additional questions. So from Navigator, thank you very everyone. Thank you Gary. Thank you Mark for coming in and sharing that this high level view of the integration from SAP Business One to ShipStation.
With that, I'll say thank you from Navigator.
Thank you from Alluvia
And thank you from ShipStation.
