This year Shopify and online marketplace eBay Inc., companies best known for helping customers sell goods online, said they plan to offer physical distribution services, using technology to stitch together networks made up of third-party warehouse operators.
Chicago-based ShipBob has raised more than $60 million in funding rounds that have backed expansion of a budding network of warehouses from Pennsylvania to California. The company focuses on direct-to-consumer companies that want one- or two-day shipping, and it also fulfills Amazon orders.
Flowspace is AWS for warehouses
This year real-estate firm the Related Cos. and property investor Greenfield Partners jointly acquired digital fulfillment operator Quiet Logistics for an undisclosed amount. The Devens, Mass., company. has a network of U.S. warehouses where robots help workers fulfill orders for digital brands such as Bonobos and Outdoor Voices, and it plans to open more to increase its same-day and next-day shipping options.
Seattle startup Flexe sees itself playing a similar innovative role in the supply chain industry, giving retailers a way to purchase warehousing space on an on-demand basis and turn what was traditionally a fixed expenditure into a variable cost.
Amazon recently pledged to make one-day shipping its new standard for Prime members. But Flexe can offer its customers similar delivery speeds given how many warehouses are on its marketplace. The startup began offering overnight delivery service two years ago.
Siebrecht co-founded Flexe with Edmond Yue and Francis Duong after they attended a housewarming party and met an entrepreneur who complained about finding warehouse space for his barware company. He estimates that $1.6 trillion is spent annually to move product from origin to destination.
Those include Austin data science platform Anaconda, as well as Flowspace, a Los Angeles-based on-demand warehousing software company that earlier this week landed a $31 million funding round led by BuildGroup.
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A separate acquisition is also helping Shopify expand its two-day delivery ambitions. The company has completed its rollout of a warehouse management system using fulfillment software from 6 River Systems, which it acquired in 2019. Now, 100% of Shopify Fulfillment Network orders are processed using the software.
Retail Technology Review.com spoke with key spokespeople from the vendor and analyst communities about current and possible future trends and areas of development within the world of warehouse management systems (WMS) and voice-directed picking solutions.
Warehousing has experienced a tremendous shift over the past four years. With e-commerce seeing meteoric increase post-COVID-19, the demand for same-day delivery and consequently distributed fulfilment has increased. As Archana Vidyasekar, research director - Visionary Innovation Group, Frost & Sullivan, points out, distributed fulfilment can entail the spreading of inventory across different warehouses or fulfilment locations that are closer to the end customer.
As Ball points out, whereas warehouses or DCs using warehouse management systems would have mainly shipped boxes or pallets, may be even truckloads, to store, virtually all the demand was suddenly coming from customers wanting home delivery. So, envisage what happens in a warehouse where I was picking boxes and cartons, and now I'm being asked to pick individual items and a lot of them. Think of the labour involved. And think of the technology required to fulfil this need. Not many warehouses or DCs were anything like as well-equipped as Amazon in terms of all the required systems and solutions in place to deal with omnichannel.
Specialist WMS vendors continue to dominate the most sophisticated and complex warehouse environments due to the breadth and depth of their current applications, their thought leadership, and their position as the vendors that others look to emulate. They have moved beyond basic WMSs, expanding their portfolios vertically and horizontally. In this Magic Quadrant, Blue Yonder, Körber and Manhattan Associates remain in the Leaders quadrant largely due to their experience serving these large, complex users with functionally broad and deep WMSs.
Specifically, on the WMS side, Pintens sees a lot more options for smart warehouse management, such as robotics, voice command, wearables and automated storage solutions on the inside of the warehouse, and integrations with couriers like ShipEngine and nShift on the outside of the warehouse. She is also seeing the rise of smart automated warehouses experimenting with 5G connectivity adaption, and drones for order picking and warehouse distribution drones.
The platform connects creators with pre-vetted product designers, suppliers, manufacturers, photographers, and warehouse companies. That way, influencers can use the solution to make branded items in various categories such as coffee, clothing, fragrances, and makeup. So yes, now all creators need to launch a brand is a phone and an audience.
Designing products before it goes into production is free. The influencers cover the costs of manufacturing any items they design. Pietra charges a handling fee (0-4$) for any samples ordered, and a flat production fee to create up to 500 units of an item. It charges incremental fees for any product assembly, quality assurance, or warehouse work after the first 500 units are made (99$+ 0.25$ per additional unit). Finally, they charge a fee for services such as shipping and fulfillment (1$ in addition to the costs). 2ff7e9595c
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