How Merchgirls supercharged their business growth with Shippit

A bit about Merchgirls

Established in 2015 by Hannah Chipkin and Pippa Joseph, Merchgirls quickly became the go-to merch solution for companies that wanted something different to the traditional merchandise offering. Armed with experience in both design and production respectively, Merchgirls is first and foremost a creative agency, focussed on creating merchandise that’s twice as nice for the broader market. The Merchgirls mission is to create products that get attention for all the right reasons and approach everything they do with quality, design and purpose at the forefront of their minds. 

The challenge at hand

To meet the growing needs of their clients during COVID, Merchgirls created a custom pick and pack process that elevated the offering from B2B to B2C on mass scale. With businesses working remotely, Merchgirls needed deliveries to travel to multiple (thousands of) different home locations, rather than one head office location. During this time, Merchgirls defaulted to manually fulfilling orders, requiring in-house staff to manage their bookings individually via phone and email with carriers.

There is no doubt that for growing businesses like Merchgirls, the increase in demand for online orders reveals the cracks and gaps in current shipping and logistics processes. Prior to using Shippit two years ago, Merchgirls had a very manual process for fulfilling client orders. To ship orders, bookings to metro and national freight carriers were placed via phone call. A slow and unautomated process meant that it was hard to obtain tracking numbers, resulting in poor tracking visibility for their customers. Not to mention the valuable in-house staff hours and resources spent on this manual process. As Pippa Joseph, Director at Merchgirls says “Before joining Shippit, we were using a very clunky system.”

Fulfilment automation that reduces costs and supports business growth

Shippit was their first ever platform for national freight, replacing the dated, manual process of fulfilling orders over the phone, including updating addresses manually and processing payments over the phone. For Merchgirls, the Shippit platform helped reduce time spent fulfilling orders by 50%, enabling them to scale their business and focus on other priority areas like product development. 

Sustainable shipping and delivery

As industry leaders in sustainable practises, Merchgirls goes beyond saying no to single use plastic in their products and packaging. With their eyes firmly set on becoming a B Corp certification, adopting an environmentally-friendly delivery platform like Shippit’s carbon neutral delivery services, where 100% of carbon emissions are offset at no extra cost, it became integral to their business needs and meeting their customer’s sustainable delivery expectations.

Improved post-purchase experience by increasing tracking visibility and customised branding

Shippit’s seamless tracking and customised branding capabilities, meant that Merchgirls could track a large volume of order all in one place. It eliminated the need to switch between different carrier websites. Instead, the team could access all the tracking data in one place to stay on top of deliveries. As a result, this led to an improved customer experience and retention by giving customers peace of mind with consistent delivery experiences. Tracking notifications and customised branding allows Merchgirls’ clients, namely Telstra Purple, to own their delivery experience at every touch point.

Immense cost saving with smart carrier allocation

Finding the best rates often requires manually searching and negotiating between different carriers. But with Shippit’s community of merchants and partnerships with Australia’s best carriers, Merchgirls gained access to exclusive and competitive shipping rates, across standard, express, same day and on demand delivery. Merchgirls was able to reduce shipping costs by 25%. In addition, the cost savings has helped reallocate internal resources to free up staff time from manual shipping and order fulfilment duties. Shippit’s smart allocation engine helped Merchgirls automatically select the cheapest or fastest carrier for every order. Not to mention that the multiple delivery options at checked  reduced delivery time per booking by 15%.

What were the results?

Opening up a new arm of the business

As well as the improved customer experience and cost savings, joining Shippit opened a completely new arm of the business for Merchgirls. Previously, operating on a prominently B2B basis shipping directly to their clients, Shippit enabled direct to customer delivery, substantially increasing Merchgirls B2C business offering and capabilities. As a result, Merchgirls saw an exponential increase in both return business and conversion rate, increasing by 90% and 300%, respectively. 

Expert shipping services for clients of all sizes

Equipped with a new arm of the business, Merchgirls worked with our experts to integrate, manage and maintain carrier APIs. The team was able to stay up-to-date on their orders, so they can keep shipping, uninterrupted. Plus, Merchgirls was able to offer clients a bespoke Shippit account for each client. The team could manage orders faster when it matters most. Built to be more reliable than Courier API’s, Shippit handles millions of requests weekly resulting in the best-in-class SLAs. Merchgirls keep customers coming back with an on-brand delivery experience that customers are familiar with which sparked more than 80% overall growth. , 

From 100 weekly parcels, on average, to over 5000 weekly parcels, Merchgirls’ partnership with Shippit has supercharged their business growth.