Name: Unpacking ShipBob’s BFCM 2025
Uploaded: 2025-12-10T16:46:06.525Z
Duration: 30 min 12 s
Description: Unpacking ShipBob’s BFCM 2025

Transcript for "Unpacking ShipBob’s BFCM 2025": Hi, everyone, and welcome to Black Friday Cyber Monday unpacked. We've got an amazing group of brand operators and technology experts sharing their breakdown of an amazing twenty twenty five Cyber Week. A few housekeeping items before we get started. Don't be afraid to use our chat box. Whether you're asking questions to speakers, sharing some comments, or chatting with fellow attendees, to get started. Maybe drop in where you're tuning in from. And we will be giving out prizes throughout the day for attendees to ask questions, to engage with our speakers. So definitely, use the opportunity to win prizes from our place, for gift cards, and more. I'm really, really excited for this first session. We have James Solier, our SVP of central operations. James has been across everything happening throughout the ShipBob network, these past this past week, and beyond. And, he's going to take us through, a really exclusive look of our Cyber Week, what we saw, the performance, and also the trends shaping the year ahead. So, James, thank you so much for joining us today. Gina, the pleasure is all mine, and thank you for those watching today. I'm just gonna go ahead and start sharing my screen. I have a couple of slides to walk us through as a group. But just a quick introduction to me. So my name is James Solier. As Gina mentioned before, I lead central operations here at ShipBob. I know it's a bit of an ambiguous turn, but you could think about my team as owning sort of forecasting, capacity planning, our carrier and transportation relationships, and supporting the execution of our fulfillment network. I've had the pleasure of working at ShipBob for about two years now as we sort of supported tremendous growth and expansion capabilities for our merchants. And prior to that, I worked about a decade at Amazon in various fine finance supply chain roles, both in corporate and field positions. So just for those of you that might be new to ShipBob, I mean, the way that you think about us is, like, we're your brand's number one solution for anything supply chain oriented. We have one tech stack that handles everything soup to nuts. We'll review in the in the next slide. We have over a 100 sales channels and integrations and operate, over 60 fulfillment centers and five distinct marketplaces with with a with a international fulfillment presence. Over the last, you know, eleven years or so of our existence, we've built deep relationships with some of the biggest b to c brands out there and have supported most of them through, meteoric growth, since the infancy, of their products. So, really excited to be here at Chipbob and really excited to be supporting these brands on these epic journeys, you know, from initial concepts to things that, you know, my kids know. So, again, referring to our tech stack and how we think through things, at the end of the day, what ShipBob is doing is it's coordinating all the order management, volume management, and advertising efforts you have across b to c marketplace, social platforms, b to b fulfillment channels. So this is you contemplating selling directly in places like Amazon and Target and stuff like that. And then through our merchant applications, decision engines, and warehouse management systems, you know, we are orchestrating all of these various movements, making sure that your customers are happy, your product is in the right place, the right order is being picked at the right time for the right customer, assigned to the right carrier. It's really soup to nuts built to help your brand grow. And it's supported physically by our large logistics network that doesn't just include those fulfillment centers, but also our dedicated inbound hubs across The United States, as well as our sort centers that allow us to keep a diversified carrier mix and have been a real differentiator in terms of transit times and carrier availability for us, since launching last year. So I know all of you here learn more about Cyber Week twenty twenty five. This is going to be a session very much focused on, I would say, buy buy and operator for brands and operators. We'll start with a quick overview of what happened generally in industry with some commentary there. And then start moving into what we're seeing at ShipBob, again, which is in a really unique position just based on the diversity of clientele it solves and the scale we're at today. So for those of you that aren't aware and maybe been interested in tracking our performance real time, ShipBob actually does have a real time tracker, that's sharing how volume is sort of evolving and scaling, since the off peak periods. You know, some of the stories you'll see pulled through this dashboard is, how distributed inventory is really helping those merchants with that inventory position achieve faster insert to deliver times on the orders, how organically carrier mix is sort of driving improvements in transit time for us as we partner with the right regionals in the right places. And then broadly from that, I think the dashboard illustrates the scalability of your technology, and and illustrates we're an organization that deploys that, not just to make sure that your orders are in great hands, but that our operators have tools that are helping them execute, you know, all along the way. It's a really great dashboard. It's really insightful to see how sort of consumer behavior pivots into peak. Also, it does a great job of reinforcing how solar reader population centers really see huge demand spikes in these periods. So if you're an ecommerce geek and you really wanna understand what's going on with demand, especially in real time, this is a really great resource. It's really interesting to watch. I know most of us here spend our mornings just sort of pulsing to get any sense of how things are trending. So Cyber Week, yet again, we break year on year records. From a Black Friday, Cyber Monday standpoint, a generation of 44,200,000,000.0 in revenue, which is up seven and a half percent year on year. Black Friday at nine and a half percent. I, you know, I've seen various commentary on whether or not inflation might have played a a play in this, but I can tell you it's not. Both within our own network and, larger marketplaces that we stay in close touch with, overall, I would say, in average, people are experiencing about an 8% year on year growth in orders and a 10% year on year growth in units, so, like, units per order. So overall, ecommerce is still extremely healthy. People are still increasing the amount of purchasing they're doing during this sort of thirty five period, and it's a great day, and year to be in our industry. As we sort of look at some of the peak volumes and hours, like, from a trend standpoint, most of those peaks, peak order ingestion times are more or less unchanged year on year. We saw a lot of traffic come through early Friday morning, from a peak period standpoint. Level outgoing over the weekend, the latest spike again on Monday as people sort of, really pushed hard on promos and traffic. But, again, all in all, going in the right direction, and, again, illustrating the importance of this segment. ShipBob itself did over 10,000,000 units over Black Friday, September, Monday. You know, that's been supported by the significant investment we've made in our own fulfillment centers. Two SICs launched last year, as well as the expansion we've had with our partner network, especially building more strategic partners, with larger site footprints, versus October. Our peaking factors are pretty extraordinary, with our volume increasing since the beginning of q q four north of 200% holistically across things. In regard in regards to where we're seeing that volume growth and concentration, some surprises, some not. Highest order volume again remains in the largest population state in The US, California. We did see some very, phenomenal growth in Canada, especially driven in part by some of the merchants that we've helped get access into international markets, including Canada. Apparel surprised me in terms of how well that category grew year over year, some of the trends that we've seen in in unit growth. Again, some of which is clearly driven by promotions. But, again, it was exciting to see some of those brands that have made pretty big pivots in their inventory strategies as an extension of all the changes with, de minimis and three two one over the year. Really see that order growth and, in a lot of cases, benefit from domestic inventory positioning, which is huge. And then, you know, for for those of us that support the you know, have wives and partners, beauty, again, is doing extremely well. A lot of volume spike. And then even on a year over year basis, some of our beauty brands saw some of the greatest growth. So, again, just it's definitely a great sign of things to come for ShipBob. But more to the point, our brands, and their the success they've seen over Black Friday seven Monday. Some of them will win standpoint. Well, that sort of, the trend overall was single digit growth holistically for industry. Within ship off, a lot of our b to c brands saw quite more than that. We had some established brands, particularly in, again, the beauty apparel segments, that saw growth north of 38 to 40%, which is extremely exciting for them. We saw a tremendous amount of, activity leading into Black FridayCyber Monday with b to b order volume, which was up roughly 60% year over year, illustrating that we had a lot of merchants that were actually looking for expanding sales channels going into peak. So, again, this is them taking inventory and expanding it into networks like, you know, an Amazon, a Walmart, a Target, presenting those products across its various forms. And, it was exciting to see so many brands leading into omnichannel this peak, again, propping up, I think, some of the overall growth that we saw. Perhaps one of the hardest parts of my job, one of the more strategic trends is accurate forecasting for Black FridayCyber Monday continues to be a challenge for everybody. With the exception of food and beverage, which I was able to stay within a couple percentage points of their forecasts, Most of our merchants were either up or down double digits in terms of their sales expectations. I think it just illustrates how important it is to really nail that demand planning standpoint. Luckily, with the network of ship off size and the redundancy we have, we're able to kinda consume that variability and and maintain performance for the most part for our merchants. But what it's really clear is that no one can really call their own shop here. So I think it's a phenomenal thing as we sort of look back and maybe you're beating yourself up or saying, how are we so heavy or how are we so light to compare to expectation? I can tell you it's far normal for you to be way off plan than on plan, which I think is just something that's really, I would say an interesting observation coming from a larger retail organization, and somewhere where we're gonna try to continue to add value for our own merchants. In terms of top performing industries, mentioned before, a lot of phenomenal growth in apparel sports, toys and games, and home goods. You know, we've seen some of our larger brands like Tony's be absolutely gangbusters this peak, which is phenomenal for them. And then from a volume standpoint, again, as part of this higher unit quarter trend, we just saw a lot of growth in beauty apparel, health and wellness. And, again, food and bev. Food and bev, again, able to do a pretty good job calling its own shops in terms of volume profile, but still seeing growth as people lean into those sort of subscription models and using, the peak season as a way to make product introductions to hopefully lifetime customers. What made this peak different for me as an operator, and what you see here is a chart. We've kinda stripped the volume out, but you can understand what the clear trend was, was how different inventory positions and inbound ramps were this year. You know, historically, there's a gradual buildup in inventory positions as many of our brands were to reach out and sort of prepare for that peak demand season. And so what that usually would would turn into is, you know, especially with a lot of, I would say, international sourcing product coming from China, they would maintain roughly twenty two, twenty three weeks of cover, all the way up until Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Organically, that would then drain to about 13 to 12. And then they would kinda hold that position up until January, and then you'd see inbound ramps come back. And usually that crest of inbound receipts happened about a week before the Black Friday, Cyber Monday period. This year, it's been far more interesting. I would say the consistency in, merchants maintaining multiple weeks of cover was was somewhat was somewhat of a surprise to us, absent the impact of things like FTZ and tariffs. From our insights, from conversations we've had with merchants, a lot of this has actually been driven by real efforts on margin preservation. So some of it actually being, I would say, tariff optimization or risk mitigation. A lot of it just being really focusing on the inbound cost structure and building as much container density and movement density as possible. But from an overall demand and inventory positioning standpoint, I would say some of the other things that this has sort of bled into his thoughts on, you know, are our storage rates as cost effective as they can be for our merchants? If this is a new trend for some brands in regards to how strong their domestic inventory position is going to be, you know, how do we work with them on multi multi regional placement strategies or finding the right site design to support the way their inventory is gonna turn going forward. So, again, I think this peak was really unique because instead of going from the traditional ramp to ship, it's been very well loaded. And in fact, inbound continues to tick up going into the new year. And then lastly, from an FTZ standpoint, continued inquiries on how people can sort of manage cash flow more effectively with these solutions. You know, we went public, I think, within the last few months illustrating our FTZ capabilities on the West And East Coast. The event inbound inquiries that we've received in regards to those offerings, I think, illustrate, there's a lot of merchants out there that are making moves purely to maintain their sort of cash position, which, again, is a significant buck buck year over year and and an illustration maybe how some of the policies that have sort of adapted over a very dynamic 2025 actually have changed the way supply chains are functioning this year. From an outbound side, like I said, we had a record Black Friday Cyber Monday period. But I one thing that I think people always forget is that there's a lot more to peak than just Turkey five. Just looking at our order data and curves for 2024 to 2023, it's all basically the same. We've still got about 40% to go. So there's still going to be huge spikes in traffic, organic or inorganic as you guys have to lean into promotions or just benefit from people doing last mile Christmas shopping. You know, those opportunities are for you to kinda continue to push promotions in the right way or even highlight the right selection to kinda drive that cart value up. Timing is of the essence as you sort of evaluate these decisions because cutoffs are coming. You know, for for those of you that are in one coastal location and stuff like that, probably by the fifteenth or sixteenth you're evaluating and and reaching that point where carriers are gonna find a part to meet those long zone shipments prior to Christmas. For those of you that are more distributed, you have a lot more leeway, but you just need to be mindful that that clock is ticking. So now is the time to remember that you've still got a tremendous amount of dam demand to go out there to to catch. Be cognizant of your cutoff periods, and continue to to lean into opportunities to deburr. And on that last piece, just a reminder that your sales and operating plans are essential in this period. At the end of the day, if you wanna increase order volume by 30% on the you know, sometime next week. Just make sure you're bringing your full operation along with you. Right? This is an easy time to kinda build backlog. A lot of fulfillment partners out there and a lot of fulfillment companies out there have pulled a lot of their overtime triggers and hiring decisions. They had to get through that Black Friday, Cyber Monday peak. If you wanna do something big from a demand perspective late in the game, completely fine. Just make sure you're being very transparent and proactive with your supply chain partners. You're illustrating to them what you expect in terms of, like, average order size in addition to order volume, what you're looking for in regards to, cutoffs and pre Christmas deliveries. Set those expectations and have those conversations. But like I said, right now, there's still a lot of demand to win. Just make sure that you're thinking through your sales and operating planning cadences, and you have tight scripts there. I think from ShipBob's perspective, we've been very pleased with Peep so far using some of the strategies that we've developed with some of our larger brands. And it's really trickled down to even some of our smaller merchants as well. So beginning sort of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we were all somewhat afraid of the weather events passing through the Midwest and Northeast. At least on the ShipBob side, we were able to do a lot of proactive load balancing in partnership with our distributed merchants. What that meant was ability to continue to shift even as we saw sort of attendance challenges and stuff like that in buildings as people found a hard to get through six inches of snow. So it just illustrates that having this sort of redundancy in your network matters because, you know, weather events like this, especially during this with higher volume periods that you'll see in a given year, you don't wanna find yourself building up a lot of backlog, being unable to ship tied to that sort of, like, challenges getting into the building. So having that redundancy and having an inventory position, I think, was a huge advantage to ship off merchants participating in our IPP program. Again, that also trickled down to some of the smaller merchants that might have support placement and just illustrated the redundancy, and resiliency of our network. The multicarrier strategy that we've deployed, again, leveraging the sort centers we've launched for the last two years, I think we're really starting to see continued dividends on. Overall, our carrier transit times on average are down 13% year on year. That's that that's on top of a double double digit improvement last year. And I think what's most exciting for us is just the recipient satisfaction. You know, when you start thinking through the likes of an Uni Uni or a Ciro or a Speedex, the list goes on. There's a lot of options right now on who to work with. And I think the the partners that which ShipBob has sort of invested in both nationally and regionally, we're seeing a lot of parity in outcomes and actually opportunities to improve transit times. So again, like, I I I am really excited about what's going on in the transportation space right now holistically. I have been extremely impressed with how low impressed with how well our regional partners have done. And I think it's something that we'll definitely see more of over the coming years as these carriers continue to, you know, add coverage, build capacity of the sort, and delight recipients. And then lastly, strategic inventory placement to the to the points raised before. You know, it's exciting to see some of our larger brands processing record volume and still getting import to deliver done in, you know, less than three business days. I I think that just illustrates that when you start reaching that sort of size and scale, as long as you feel very comfortable about what your average order profile is and the depth of your catalog, there's a lot of benefits that come from having a partner that can support you through a distributed model. And, again, the the CX and transit times that we're seeing from our merchants that are participating in that program, even though we've got peak season demand and all that 200% growth since October, I think just further illustrates the the benefits of that sort of strategy and how well ShipBob's been able to deploy it. So it's stuff like this that makes me very proud to be here. So with that, we're at a q and a portion. I believe we'll be joined now by Chelsea Hood, our Vice President of Merchant Success. Hey, James. Thank you so much for that great session. Hi, everybody. I am Chelsea Hood, as James said, the vice president of merchant success here at ShipBob. So I am very excited to get to do some follow-up q and a with James today. My teammate, Lindsay, is monitoring the chat, so feel free to drop any questions there. We'll make sure we're following up with every question that comes through even if we don't get to it in the live session today. We do, James, have a few questions teed up ready to go for you that we've collected beforehand. So love to dive right in with you. Let's do it. With so much peak volume still in front of us, what would you say are the smartest moves merchants can prioritize now to make the most of the remaining holiday season? So, you know, I had the fortune of delivering a presentation at Parcel Forum earlier this year, and the whole theme was supply chain is your p and l. It is literally everything you were trying to do for your customer's manifest. So I'm gonna use that framework here. You know, I think now is the time of year where there's just big changes in how people convert and the amount of traffic pouring through websites and marketplaces. So it's a really good opportunity to assess your unit economics, opportunities to convert, and opportunities to maybe do better things about your cost structure. The things that I would start with is, again, looking at my conversion patterns. Where am I succeeding or failing? How is my order behavior going through? Are there opportunities for me to offer fast ship options to my customers as we approach cut offs? I would be thinking. very holistically how I'm taking all this traffic and finding a way to monetize it more effectively looking at prior year trends. On the order analysis piece and looking at sort of like what my average basket looks like, you know, I'd be really contemplating opportunities to maybe look at some of my slower moving SKUs that's occupying space that I'm paying a lot of storage for. And. finding ways to discount them or even bundle them in such a way that helps, like, clear space more cost effectively than any liquidation channel while making the end recipient feel like they're getting a huge value. So a lot of what I've seen in larger retail organizations in the past is this is a great time to assess stuff where maybe you're overbought. Maybe you're not happy with the amount of fixed cost exposure you have to it, and sort of right size your inventory position. And then again, if you've got really robust models that understand customer lifetime value when you're driving for those conversion efforts, You know, offering a free product here and there can actually be a nice tipping point again from that conversion standpoint. So again, I would just assess all the elements of your your p and l. Think through that holistically. Take advantage of the traffic. Hopefully, that's first and foremost driving conversion efforts. And in other cases, you know, look at some of the stuff that's driving up room in your supply chain. Find a way to leverage that in a way that's gonna be more cost effective than some form of liquidation or, discount out of season. Makes total sense. Thank you for all that. So next up, every cyber week comes with its own set of unique challenges, but there are always standout wins as well. I know you hit on a lot of those wins and challenges in your presentation, but what would you say are the biggest operational wins you saw across our network? That's a great point. I would say the how quickly the network started shipping same day in the majority of sites was really exciting. So the call earlier before, you know, we spent a lot of time working across our larger merchants understanding what the demand patterns are. You know? And even if we understood they were they had a chance of being wrong, we kinda built redundancy in scenario analysis to figure out, you know, how we could get more transportation capacity we needed, how we could get more people into those buildings we needed. And I would say overall, that that playbook, was was executed with phenomenal success. And there's things and bodies that should illustrate that that that's really playing out for end recipients. You know, our contact volume is down 25% year over year. That to me is very much illustrated illustrative of the end recipient during being quite comfortable with the experience they're getting. And the amount of merchants we have, they're now able to, like, look hard at their ad and marketing spend and say, hey. Can I go capture more demand and share in peak? Because I now have a fulfillment partner positioned to do so. That's exactly the spot you wanna be in. So that's why I, like, I would say our biggest successes. It's all about, again, that demand generation and supporting merchants. And I think, in most in almost all cases, we're right where we wanna be with that relationship. Perfect. As brands look ahead to 2026, how do you see those big wins from Black Friday, Cyber Monday kinda shaping q one strategy? Based on what you're seeing across the network, Is there anything that we should be thinking about as our customers plan for the New Year? You know, I think for us, we're gonna kinda continue to do what we can to help merchants the benefits of distributed inventory positions. We know that that's not easy math. Like, there's a working capital impact from increasing inventory. If your demand signals are highly risky, you don't wanna be holding the bag with stuff that you can't sell. Like, we we we fully appreciate that it might feel like it's a big door to go through. But often or oftentimes, when we start getting deeper into those conversations with merchants, we find the same thing. There's a handful of SKUs generating the vast majority of the demand. We can do a multi tiered strategy where there's still a hero site that supports the entire catalog, but other buildings that just are covering that sort of head selection. And then from that, they're able to get the majority of the benefits that come with the distributed inventory position without facing incremental split risk. I know that feels like a huge big lift for some, but I can tell you it's not as scary as you think. And we're excited about really helping our merchants, understand that more completely going into next year. Great. There's a couple of questions in the chat around ShipBob's demand forecasting models that we use for Black Friday Cyber Monday twenty twenty five and kinda how we strategize around that. I'm wondering if we can answer a couple of those questions, James. So how accurately did our ShipBob demand forecasting model play out with actual order volumes and what were the variances? And then there's another question just around how we do that internally. Is it external data from our merchants internal. models? Can you speak a bit more about. that? So the the way I would address how we manage demand planning is it's a it's a group effort. So what Chip Bob can see is historic year over year trends, like for like analysis around similar product profiles, how your how total origins or regions are performing from a demand standpoint. So we can sort of support the macro signals to help with it. But we don't know if you're gonna be on Good Morning America in two days. And we don't know if you're going to be offering the world's most incredible deal on your website, for the next week. So it has to come sort of part and parcel, which is why this S and OP process conversation is so important. There is no one that I have seen that has that have called the shop perfectly, from, I would say, Thanksgiving through the next week in my entire career. And I have seen organizations spend more money than you can imagine on multiple PhDs focused just on that problem statement. So at the end of the day, success comes from really working backwards. So this is the merchant's expectation from a demand standpoint. This is what we see. Here's what the what we think the driver is going to be. And then Chip, doing what I would call the macro sense check. Like, Hey, this seems to be more or less in line with what we'd expect. But more to the point, when we, when we're off forecast together, we learn together. What did you learn about this promo? How are we gonna learn about how it applies to the next one? Because at the same time, you guys or our merchants are out there right sizing the customer cost of acquisition. They're making the math right that I overpay on ad spend for this. You know, we on our side wanna make sure, like, okay. We can handle this level of variance. I don't wanna make this a a cost problem for anybody. So if we adapt a staffing strategy that looks this way, if they're over by 20%, we'll pivot this way. If they're under by 20%, we'll move on to this other work. So it's it's that S and OP cadence of staying close together, Mhmm. that connective tissue that helps you succeed. There is no human in my mind that can call a shot perfectly on any forecast during this period as mentioned before. It comes down to the ability, the merchant and its fulfillment, supply chain partner to work hand in hand together. Yep. That makes total sense. Knowing that this is such a challenging area, one where there's a lot of variance, what are the best practices that you see merchants who do it well kind of adopt as they, you know, plan ahead? Yeah. I mean, just work work from the funnel. Like, that's the nice part of this this this mindset of really understanding your conversion drivers and everything. You know, some of the best things I've seen is sort of like Google enter the top of the funnel, what ways are we going to be driving conversion, when they convert, what's the average order profile we expect. And even if you're wrong, the first couple of times in a framework like that, the insights you start to generate on, like, how you put together, items and presentations, how you actually navigate your sites, your d to c experience. You know, maybe if you're really fancy, you're doing some AB testing. But that that exercise not just gets you tighter at forecasting, it it actually helps you understand the dynamics of conversion for your business. And the reason why that makes my life supporting you easier in the long run is you might then say, hey. I know that a two day offering is better for me because I'm looking at how I perform when I'm providing a two day promise versus a five day promise. And on this particular item, it matters. So that's where I would say all of this to me is actually one cohesive ecosystem. If you understand your traffic, you understand your conversion drivers, you should be pretty good at calling your forecasts, you know, relative to anyone else. And in that vein, that same exercise should help your supply chain partner understand those same conversion drivers and make sure that the solutions that are offering you fit those needs. Perfect. Great. Well, I know we have kind of less than one minute left. I think we got through a good chunk of the questions in the q and a. Again, some really good ones that have, trickled in as well that we will absolutely make sure that we follow-up with offline here. But with that, thank you so much for joining us today, everyone. Stay tuned for our next session, which is gonna be with Britney Baron, ShipBob's head of product marketing, to hear about some of the exciting product releases from the past year that that powered such a strong Black Friday Cyber Monday twenty twenty five. And thank you so much, James, for all these insights and a fantastic engaging presentation. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everybody.