[EP 11] Modern Merchant Podcast: Special Guest, SkuVault

Below, you will find a transcript of the episode.

Austin Rose:

All right. Hi, everyone. Thanks for jumping on. This is your host Austin with The Modern Merchant Podcast. Got a really fun episode. With me, as always, we have Travis, CEO of Flxpoint, and our special guest today is Kim from SkuVault. She’s the senior director of business development. Kim, thanks for jumping on today. Appreciate it.

Kim Wren:

Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate being on here and talking to you all about our business.

Austin Rose:

Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve been working with SkuVault for a while now, there’s a handful of mutual clients between Flxpoint and SkuVault. You guys have probably been honestly top five one of our favorite partners to work with, super helpful. It seems to align really well with what we’re doing over here on the Flxpoint side. To get us started, what do you specifically do at SkuVault, and just give us a really quick little Reader’s Digest overview of SkuVault?

Kim Wren:

Sure. I’m the senior director of business development, basically, that means I’m responsible for bringing in leads and sales. I specifically work within the partnership program bringing in new partners. I look at it a little more strategically. This is newer for me as we’ve started growing the team, so my job is now to look for new partners and figure out who we can strategically work with that fits well within our alignment of what we’re doing, because we are a little bit picky. We’d like to work with people who align with us, have good customer service, offer a good solid software, or offering, or integration. We want to make sure that we’re taking good care of our clients.

Austin Rose:

Yeah. No, absolutely makes sense. And how did you get started with SkuVault?

Kim Wren:

I actually was a customer at SkuVault in 2013. I was operations manager for an e-commerce company, and was looking for an inventory management solution that could help us get our product back into all of the marketplaces, and was at the ChannelAdvisor conference that year and SkuVault was there displaying, and I talked to them and signed up with them immediately. And then a year later, I’d really just had enough of dealing in the e-commerce space, I didn’t want to deal with the actual direct sales of it anymore, and was looking to move more into software. And Eastus, who is our CEO, and I had met, he had an ad running. I called him. I interviewed and here I am seven years later in a different role. I started out with us when we were about nine people in one room, and built the client services team up to about 25, and then moved over to BD in partnership about a year and a half ago.

Travis Mariea:

Wow, cool.

Austin Rose:

That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s so cool. I feel like I’ve heard that so many times, like I started as a customer and then I ended up working for the company, which is so cool to see. And it’s a great way of starting.

Kim Wren:

[crosstalk 00:03:08]

Austin Rose:

You already understand the software, and being in e-commerce software, right? It can get pretty complex, especially for new people in this space. But no, that’s awesome. One of the topics that I wanted to hit on today, and this is really interesting, because you did categorize SkuVault as an inventory management system, and we see this all the time of some people, they’re like, “I need a warehouse management system.” But they mean inventory management system, and then it’s vice versa. There’s just like a struggle between that realm of those two acronyms, and what’s really what. If you can give the best example, or overview of what is the difference between a warehouse management system and an inventory management system, and where does SkuVault play in that space?

Kim Wren:

Sure. In our early days, we would have definitely called ourselves an inventory management system, but from the beginning, I always liked to say warehouse management system. I come from an industrial background, so I do think that we lean more towards a WMS. And today when I’m asked, my standard answer is, we are a WMS with an IMS built in. Everybody has some inventory management functionality, in that they’re pushing quantities out to market places or to venues, and that’s fine. We should all have it, because we have different customers that are using us in different ways, and that allows the client to have a choice in how they’re getting their information out there.

Kim Wren:

But what SkuVault does that makes it different, and I think what makes the two acronyms different, or two names different, is a warehouse management system really starts when you leave the front of the house of a business and you walk through that wall into the warehouse. And when you go in there, that’s where we play well. We help you figure out what you have, where you have it. We [inaudible 00:04:54] your workers through your warehouse, we’re making sure that the product that you’re picking is the right product and in the right quantity for the right order, every single time. We’re helping you receive your product, we’re helping you know what’s selling, and we’re helping you move product into the proper slotting, keeping it organized well, so that you don’t have a big mess in your warehouse.

Kim Wren:

But I do think a lot of times, the biggest key for us is knowing that… We work off of a scanning system, so use barcode scanning within SkuVault, and make sure that you are picking the right product. It’s really that barcode scanning that makes a difference, and using quality control, because that helps our clients and helps anybody doing this to make sure that they’re keeping their seller performance higher. And we all know that’s important. Amazon, eBay, Walmart, they’re not going to let you stay if your seller performance is poor. Your website is going to die if you have terrible reviews, so that’s where we help with that, because we’re helping you ensure that you’re getting the right product to the right person in the right quantity very quickly, because you know where things are.

Kim Wren:

No more trying to remember… I used to call it playing hide and seek with your inventory. You got your warehouse, and your guys in your warehouse, maybe you have three or four guys in your warehouse, and they all know where everything is. That’s great until one that knows, oh, one gets sick and he isn’t there that day, and then who takes care of it? So that’s where SkuVault comes in, and that’s really, to me, that’s the difference between a WMS and an IMS. The IMS takes care of pushing the inventory out and making sure the inventory gets out to the front end, where WMS takes care of it all on the backend and what’s going on within your warehouse.

Travis Mariea:

And that’s a good way of thinking about… I like how you put that, right? It’s the warehouse management team or the warehouse team actually using the WMS, right? When it gets to pick, pack and ship, there might be a merchandiser or e-commerce manager on the front end using an IMS. I feel like I hear OMS a lot. Basically, IMS, OMS I guess we’re using interchangeably here, right? To some extent. I mean, I guess really it’s blurring so much, but OMS essentially is what we’re talking about further up the stack, and IMS is similar, right? And when you actually get to the warehouse side of things, that’s where a SkuVault helps you go through.

Travis Mariea:

And I’m going to steal Austin’s next question here, but honestly, I’m very curious to see how you describe where you guys fit in the tech stack. We talk about upstream, having that order management system, the inventory management system. There’s repricing, there’s distributed order management, so I’d be curious on how you define that. There’s ShipStation, where does that fit, right?

Kim Wren:

Right.

Travis Mariea:

And how would you define that in the stack? I’d be curious on how you look at it.

Kim Wren:

We consider ourselves on the tail end of the tech stack. We are often that piece that comes along after you’re a little more mature. You’ve probably been in business for a year or two, or at the very least, you’ve had a brick and mortar. But you often don’t see the value in organizing your warehouse right at the beginning, because you do believe you can operate off a spreadsheet, you can do it really well. I’m here to tell you, you can’t. But if you think you can, congratulations and good luck to you, but we do tend to come along after that. The typical person coming into e-commerce, what’s the first thing they’re going to look for? A website. And they’re going to look for some sort of channel management listing tool. Those are the first couple things that they look for.

Kim Wren:

Often I hear people saying they’re looking for that shipping solution and that warehouse organization solution really at the end. It amazes me to this day the number of people that are doing 5, 8, 10 million dollars that come to us and they’ve been operating off of a spreadsheet. I mean, our biggest competitor is still a spreadsheet, and I don’t honestly know how they do it, because it’s a little scary. Your quantities can’t be right, you’ve got to be disappointing people, you’ve got to have oversells, undersells. Your cash flow can’t be great, so yeah.

Kim Wren:

But as far as where we fit, I think we’re more towards the end of it. I [inaudible 00:09:12] say we’re the last piece. Because I do believe that after us, people start thinking, “Oh, how can I better organize my finances?” So they’ll start looking maybe at better organizing their accounting and what they’re doing with that, but often, we’re not too far from there.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. And I think you’re spot on with, you start with a website, right? That’s what you need, you can get by with that. ShipStation seems to be a logical follow up for a lot of people. I’m curious what the inflection point is, when you’re running an e-commerce business, what’s the ding, ding, ding, I need to use SkuVault, right? Especially if you’re using something like ShipStation you might think that works for you. You’re printing labels, you’re selling things, why move? What’s the common reason why people move over to a system like yours?

Kim Wren:

Organization, it’s the biggest thing, I think. It’s organization within your warehouse so that you know what you have and where you have it all the time. It’s getting the warehouse set up in a manner that you have locations built within your warehouse, that you have multiple warehouses. One of the things with SkuVault is we reflect your virtual warehouses, so we can reflect your FBA warehouse, we can reflect any third-party logistics that you have, and then we can also reflect what you have in your physical warehouse. With SkuVault, we’re helping you organize what’s going on in your warehouse with your inventory, but not just in your warehouse, across the board in all the places that are housing your inventory, and what’s going on with that.

Kim Wren:

With ShipStation, and ShipStation is a top partner for us, so we look at them a lot and what they do. I’ll give them a little shout out here. They’re a great inventory management system if you’re a small company. I personally have used their pick list in the past when I worked for a very small company, but it’s not as advanced as what we’re doing. It’s not doing the routing. SkuVault has over 50 different settings to route your workers with paperless picking, so when you’re looking at routing your workers through your warehouse, you want to make sure that you’re routing them in a manner that’s smart. You want to make sure that you’re not running out, picking an order, running back, shipping it.

Kim Wren:

And that’s more of what SkuVault is set up to do, is being able to pick 50 orders at a time, and then come back and ship 50 orders, instead of picking five orders, shipping five orders. But you’re also picking them in a manner that you’re walking down aisle one, going behind it and walking back up aisle two, and you’re not backtracking. And then of course there’s the receiving, and there’s purchase orders, and there’s the other things that you’re doing within the warehouse. But organization is really the biggest one.

Austin Rose:

And what makes me think though, because we get this so much, we get those people that are on spreadsheets. We talk to those people too, and they’re like, “I’m doing it all on spreadsheets.” And we’re like, “Wow, okay.” Because we see that too, right? They’re doing millions of dollars, and it’s… Or hundreds of orders a day, and it’s like, “How are you doing this?” You guys seem to be in the realm of still helping out small businesses as well, in the sense that your price point isn’t terrible compared to some other competitors out there where you’re…

Austin Rose:

I think what a lot of people think of is when they want to say, “I need a warehouse management system. or an inventory management system.” They’re instantly thinking NetSuite and Oracle, right? Or they instantly think of SAP, or some enterprise full-on solution. And there’s options out there that aren’t that, and that’s SkuVault. Is that in the same realm? You guys still help out the small business, right?

Kim Wren:

We do. I mean, we go all the way up to enterprise, our largest plan is bringing in billions of dollars, but we do still have a price point that can help the small to medium business. We have a hands-on approach when we’re helping our clients, as well, so we want to make sure that you’re successful. And we spend a lot of time talking to them, finding out what it is that they want, what can we do to help them. But more importantly, when we’re onboarding somebody, we’re trying to make sure that we’re showing them how to use the system in the manner that’s going to work best for them, and then advising them on workflows that will work best for their business, and how they can improve their business with better workflows, but without going outside of what their capabilities are for the space, the people, the resources that they have.

Kim Wren:

We want to keep it within the resources that are available to them, but at the same time, a small business that’s doing $2 million a year should have the opportunity to start out organized, instead of having to wait until they’re doing 10 million to be organized. And so our price point allows that. We started, what? 299 a month. So for that price, you can get in and you can use SkuVault, and you can organize your warehouse, you can get everything out there, and you can know what you have, you can make sure that you’re scanning, you can make sure that everything’s going out correctly.

Kim Wren:

But you also get the benefits of our reporting, but the best part is you don’t have to use all of it. We actually were talking about this today. We have a feature in our system that was built for small businesses many, many years ago, and it’s called Auto-Remove. And so a really small client that does not want to use a scanning capability doesn’t have to. They can use this Auto-Remove, and it’s like training wheels. It helps them to get in and get going, and then as they figure it out, they can take those training wheels off and they can start using a scanner.

Kim Wren:

It’s really helpful for somebody that wants to grow, but then on the other side, we have the paperless picking, we have the advanced routing capabilities for somebody that’s an enterprise level that wants to come into us at that enterprise. Maybe they’re doing 25 million a year and their solution isn’t working for them. A lot of the old solutions out there were not built for e-commerce, they’re not cloud based. It’s not as easy to use with some of the integrations that are out there, so they’re looking for something like us that works better in e-commerce, and we work great for that as well.

Kim Wren:

We’ve tried to keep it in a manner that is still friendly to small business, but we’re building more and more for enterprise systems, if that makes sense.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, it does. I guess, I’m curious as far as your customer, the breakout between… We’ve seen this rise in the direct to consumer brand, right? But retailers probably, they’ve obviously been the e-commerce merchants out the gate initially. I’m curious, retailers versus brands versus maybe even 3PLs, I don’t know if that’s in your mix at all. What’s the breakout, I guess, on the existing customer base? How would you define that?

Kim Wren:

Our existing customer base is probably still about 50% resellers. That number might be a little high, though. It might be a little less than that. We do service 3PLs, and we specifically service… We’re really great with 3PLs who are also running their own e-comm within there, because we’re built for that. We’re built for you to be able to run a 3PL, and run your own business, and be able to separate out that reporting and that information, so we are built for that. But we also have clients who are doing a lot of wholesale. We have a lot of B2B clients within our system. We currently serve about 20% of our clients are B2B. Our 3PL is still a little bit lower, I believe that number is around 10% right now, and it actually might be 8% or 9%.

Kim Wren:

It’s still a fairly lower number, but it’s growing tremendously. And we’ve seen it really take an increase in the last three months, so we’re seeing more and more people who want to diversify, they want to move their inventory around the country, they’re looking for a solution to help them… Maybe on the West Coast it’s a little bit smaller, that has a little bit lower price point, more adaptable for a small to medium business. And we’re servicing those 3PLs and we’re helping them.

Travis Mariea:

Nice.

Austin Rose:

Yeah, I feel like that agile fulfillment, right? It’s always going to be a thing, and it’s always going to grow, so it’s interesting that you are saying that that’s growing. And you were hitting on some futures, and this was another question I wanted to ask, and I was just curious. What’s the future look like for SkuVault? Are you guys doing any new futures? Is it new stuff coming up on the horizon this year, next year? I mean, any insight, anything cool you guys got going on?

Kim Wren:

Yeah, there’s a lot going on at SkuVault right now. We’ve grown… We were bootstrapped until about two and a half years ago, and that’s when we took our only round of funding, and we’re still… We’ve just grown continuously since then, and our team has gone to where we’ve more than doubled in that time. I believe we’re at around 100 employees that are direct employees now. In the last six to nine months, we’ve added teams. We’ve added a product team, so rather than just a product person, we have a whole team of people for the product. Our plant services team has grown out, our development team has grown into multiple teams. Even just business development has grown into additional teams. And what that’s done for us, has allowed us to really have some major growth. Some of the things that are coming up are a lot of new integrations. We have a wayfarer in the works right now. It’s being tested, so we will be releasing that soon.

Kim Wren:

We’re looking at zero, and releasing zero, just as something that we’ve noticed that some of our smaller clients are interested in having. We’re also looking at possibly adding another shipping solution to our integration side. And then as far as development goes, we do have a business hub coming out. Business hub has been in the works for many years, and business hub is the answer for us to helping the 3PL and the wholesale business grow even more so, and helping companies who are multi-warehouse parent/child type relationships be able to have better visibility in SkuVault, without having to show everything. There’s a parent child type relationship where if you are a large corporation, you can now share your information with other divisions.

Kim Wren:

But more importantly, if you’re a wholesaler, and let’s say that you are a wholesaler who wants to bring his clients in and be able to see what you have in stock, we’re going to allow you to be able to tap into that and get that information into SkuVault, be a customer. You can also bring your customers in, so if you are a wholesaler and you can bring your customers in, that customer can come in, see your inventory. If they’re a full fledged user on that business development side, they’re going to be able to push that inventory out to their marketplaces, they’re going to be able to treat it just like it was their own.

Travis Mariea:

Cool.

Kim Wren:

It’s a little weird, because it’s not designed to be anything… I don’t want to make it sound like it’s designed for any sort of drop shipping replacement, because that’s not what it is. It’s really designed for you to be able to do more of just in time, that’s probably a better way of putting it. If you have a supplier who is a day or two UPS drive away from you, we all know what people do. They sell their product, and then they order it and they get it in and then they ship it, if they can get away with it, if they have the lead times. This allows that. On a bigger scale, it allows them to sell products that they might not otherwise want to sell, because they’re slow moving products. And they may not want to be able to sell a product that’s a $2,000 item that they’re going to sell two a year, but now they can offer that from their wholesaler, and not have to necessarily stock that item.

Kim Wren:

They can bring it in just in time to get it back out again, but then the really big part is the 3PL. We’re really excited about the 3PLs and being able to separate out those warehouses, and being able to show you as a 3PL operator, you will have your master account and your 3PL clients will be able to see their individual inventory, but not their competitor’s that are within your warehouse, so that’s really exciting. And that should be out soon. I hope that we see it I believe September, possibly October, but we should see it very soon. And then we have another feature coming out, I keep forgetting, I keep saying the name wrong, so I wrote it today. It’s Datacoach, and it’s where we’ve revamped our dashboard.

Kim Wren:

If you’ve ever been in SkuVault, you don’t like to show people our dashboard, because it’s just not that great. It was designed a long time ago when e-commerce hadn’t grown as much, and now we’ve partnered with some BI tools, and we’ve got a much better dashboard coming out. Actually it starts in beta… It’s been in beta, but it starts rolling out to internal teams this week. We will have it out in full force around Labor Day, so it will give you a better insight into your data within SkuVault so that you know what you’re selling at a glance, rather than having to run a big long report. It’ll know what you have where at a glance, so it’s more at a glance. You can get the data already out of SkuVault, but you got to run a report, and you might have to export it, and you might have to manipulate it. And this is going to take care of that for you, so we’re very excited about that.

Kim Wren:

We’ve been talking about it for a couple of weeks, and where we’re going with it, so those are a couple of the things that are coming. And then we are expanding on the internal tools that we’ve got for the warehouse management with making sure that we’re doing a really good job taking care of the first in, first out, the FIFO, making sure that we’re dealing really well and growing some of the information that you get around lot numbers and route serialization, because those are some of the things that we’re doing that our competitors aren’t really looking at or doing, because they’re not necessarily in the space exactly the way we are. So those are some of the ways that we’re looking at growing in the warehouse. And then we just keep looking upstream. What are our competitors upstream doing and what kind of cues can we take from them, and from what our clients are asking for? We’re trying to be really good listeners and hear what they want.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, that’s [crosstalk 00:24:26]

Kim Wren:

That was a lot.

Travis Mariea:

You’ve got a lot going on, you’re putting that money to work, it sounds like. You got a lot coming, and just to go back real quick on our WMS conversation. That’s what I think about when I think about WMS. Flxpoint has not set out to ever be, we’ve always said we’re not going to be a WMS. We’ll partner with WMS, we’ll be that one layer up, will be the order routing, more logic, almost ERP-like type platform, e-commerce operations platform we’re running with, right?

Travis Mariea:

But I think about the FIFO stuff, I think about lot numbers and tracking that, optimizing picking and packing, and in the serialization side, right? That’s been huge. We’ve seen that come up, and then when we have someone come to us, we’re like, “That’s not our roadmap. We don’t plan on working with a WMS partner, so it makes sense why you guys are doubling down there. And I joke about taking on the money, but I mean, obviously you guys. like you said, you’ve doubled in people, right?

Kim Wren:

Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

We’re getting to that point. We’re actually formalizing teams versus having a marketing guy and a product guy and that kind of thing, so we’re right there with you. I’m curious. We’ve seen Stitch Labs with Square, right? We’ve seen TradeGecko with QuickBooks, we’ve seen Skubana with wholesale or 3PL Central, right? So we’ve seen that and I guess those three definitely could be considered competitors, I guess, I’m sure, right? With you guys a lot.

Kim Wren:

Yeah. For sure.

Travis Mariea:

And even us, sometimes. We’ll partner sometimes. A lot of times we won’t, right? I’m curious. What’s your take on those acquisitions, just as a whole or just the market in general?

Kim Wren:

I think the market in general, with the consolidation, I do think that COVID helped drive some of that, simply because I think people are looking. I think companies are looking for the growth. Those of us that are looking for the growth, we’re looking for ways to do it, and it’s not quite as easy as it was pre-COVID to hire somebody, which is… I do think that’s a little amusing, because the one thing that COVID did that I think is fantastic, is it made us truly a worldwide labor market. But it also seemed like it made it harder to hire, so I don’t really know why that is, but-

Travis Mariea:

There’s so much private equity, and there’s just so much investment in it, and everyone’s taking on money, so salaries are up, and now people are… They’re looking at me, I don’t have to work in my own market, like you said. So yeah, I agree. There’s more fish in the sea, but it’s harder to catch them, because there’s a lot more bait out there as well.

Kim Wren:

Well, and I think like in the case of… One of them. Stitch Labs. They bought it and then they just took it apart. I think they bought the technology that they wanted, and bought… I had heard rumors that there were some really good tech people there that they wanted, and so they just bought the company. And I guess if the price is right, you do that, because that way you get the technology that you want, and you get the people building the technology that you want.

Kim Wren:

And sometimes I think it’s maybe it’s just in certain cases it’s easier to just buy into that technology than to spend, what? Three, four years developing the technology. Because let’s face it, it takes a long time. I mean, I’ve looked at what we’ve done with the business hub, and we’ve been talking about it a… I mean, I’ve been here seven years, so I have seen the evolution of how long it takes to do things. And nothing happens overnight, so if you can buy into some of the technology, or a portion of it so that you can make it easier for your growth, or faster for your growth, then I think that’s part of it. But I think, yeah, they’ve definitely been interesting. It’s definitely changed the face of things. And the TradeGecko one was really bizarre.

Travis Mariea:

[crosstalk 00:28:19]. They’re sunsetting… We’ve been getting emails from potential prospects and existing customers saying they’re sunsetting by region, so it seems similar to Stitch Labs. Think might be a little bit different. In our space, Dsco going up to CommerceHub has been interesting to watch that transition, but it’s been a very exciting time for sure, in the last couple years.

Kim Wren:

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think the TradeGecko one probably was the strangest one to me to see. Stitch Labs didn’t really surprise me a whole lot. I feel like they were having a little bit of an identity crisis anyway, so that doesn’t really shock me. But TradeGecko was a little weird. Skubana, they had a good order routing system, so we’ll see.

Travis Mariea:

[crosstalk 00:29:07]. It seems like a partner combination play there, kind of a sum greater than the parts kind of thing.

Kim Wren:

Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, it’s been pretty cool to see it, and yeah. Well, it’s more about what we’ve seen, and we have conversations with… Whether it’s private equity, or whether it’s just other partners in general, and just in the market, and it seems like there is that platform play now. And these guys want to… They get on, they get a business user on and they are under platform and they want to process the payments, or they want to just keep them. They want to give them a website, they want to give them the POS, they want to give them all that kind of stuff, so it seems like TradeGecko, Stitch Labs, even Sellbrite with GoDaddy, that was a play there, so it’s been interesting to watch for sure.

Kim Wren:

Yeah, I think and then when you look at POS I mean, Lightspeed has bought up… I don’t know, what? Five, six, seven little POS systems over the last couple of years.

Travis Mariea:

Sure.

Kim Wren:

There’s been quite a few of them that they’ve bought up, so yes, there’s a lot of interesting consolidation going on.

Travis Mariea:

It’s all the big, even Shift4 and 3D [inaudible 00:30:12].

Kim Wren:

Yeah.

Austin Rose:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Kim Wren:

Yeah. But it’ll be interesting to see how some of these play out. We are big fans of the best in class, and not all in one. We just had that discussion again today about why best in class is better than an all in one. And really, as you grow as a company, I think as our e-commerce sellers grow, they see the value in that, in being able to piece together what they need where everybody that they’ve got is the best in what they’re doing, rather than taking one company that does a few things okay, a few things not very well, and one thing pretty good. And then what do they end up with? Hopefully, the consolidation won’t go to that. Although I don’t know, maybe it would help the rest of us.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:31:06].

Austin Rose:

I think it does.

Travis Mariea:

It seems like it’s clearing the field. It’s clearing the playing field for us, it’s been kind of nice. [crosstalk 00:31:11], and it would just be bringing us back, right? It’d be bringing us back to the start of things where it was like an all in one, on-premise ERP that had these different modules you bought, and this module was not accurate, like you said. And it’s kind of like we’re getting to the point where… We did stitch everything together, whether it’s through Zappy or custom development, systems like ours, whatever it might be. But the APIs are getting better, the integrations are getting deeper. And I think a two to three… I don’t think eight different solutions makes sense. I think having a hub, right? Which is what we’re betting on, makes a lot of sense, having all your data in one spot, and then having a really smart way of getting a two way sync to a lot of best in class software.

Kim Wren:

No, I agree. And I think you’re going to see… Our average customer has three and a half technology connections, so I think you’re going to see… I think that number is going to go up as our client matures more and more. We’ve seen it go up as they’ve matured, so I think it’ll continue to. I think the ERP is probably the most interesting. The old, traditional ERP, where there’s no API connections, and you’re doing more in a… I guess, more of an EDI fashion, where you’re doing the electronic data interfacing, and you’re trying to pull everything together. I think that’ll be the more interesting one. I think when you get more into what you guys are doing with the order management and the routing, and where it’s all built through an API, we’re going to see more and more people moving in that direction. And even the larger companies that are out there.

Kim Wren:

I mean, we have divisions of really large brands that are with us, where we may not have the whole company, but we have smaller versions of it who have gone direct-to-consumer, and they needed somebody who could help them with their e-commerce portion of their warehouse management. And maybe it’s in its own facility, and so they’ve come to us, and so it’s always fun and interesting to see that, because you know that somewhere in that company is some old proprietary system that’s built in, what? 1975 on a mainframe, and…

Travis Mariea:

Just a blinking green [crosstalk 00:33:39]

Kim Wren:

Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

… 100.

Kim Wren:

Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, but then the fun part is to lift and shift off of that, right?

Kim Wren:

Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

That’s a part that I’m not envious of doing, but yeah. No, it’s been pretty crazy. And you see other systems like Alloy. I don’t know if you’ve seen Alloy, it’s like the Zappier for e-commerce and just-

Kim Wren:

Yes.

Travis Mariea:

One thing we’ve bet on is, like you said, EDI is an archaic, or EDI is traditional ERP of what we call an archaic language to connect things. But it sits there for obvious reasons, people are ingrained in their systems with it. What we’ve been really loving to do is allow our customers to connect directly to their vendors who are on Shopify stores, and just pull those products directly in, sync orders directly in. And we just envision this world where everyone has an open API, which is… We don’t have to envision it, it’s happening now today.

Kim Wren:

It is.

Travis Mariea:

And just connecting well, and the data flowing back and forth. And SkuVault being a big part of, right now today, our customer’s warehouse manager systems, but maybe, as you alluded to, maybe in the future, their partner’s warehouse managers system, right?

Kim Wren:

Right.

Travis Mariea:

We don’t really have that connection today, but it will be interesting to see that use case come to fruition where we’re dealing with a reseller, their vendor is on SkuVault, and they’re sending orders instead of via EDI. That’s going to be a fun use case to tackle with you guys.

Kim Wren:

Yeah, and I think it’ll be interesting to just be able to go in there and just write the order. You can see immediately what your wholesaler has, and be able to write your order, get it through and watch that inventory level just go down, because you just placed the order and just took all that out of their warehouse. So yeah, and really, open API and being able to use API is just the key. I’m always amazed when I’m talking to somebody and they’re like, “Well, we don’t have an API yet.” I’m like, “Oh.”

Travis Mariea:

Wow.

Kim Wren:

Okay, we can do something with FTP, or some other fun technology, but API would be better, so.

Austin Rose:

Yeah. Well, that’s the struggle with the supply side too, right? I mean, if you’re connected into your vendors and suppliers and to SkuVault, those are the guys that are still behind the times, where oh, I can’t just send you an email and a spreadsheet, or a spreadsheet on an email, and you can’t connect that way? Things like that, so.

Kim Wren:

Yeah, and it’s… I don’t know if it’s specific industries, or what. We did a show two years ago that was… It does lean more towards industrial and people that are in the warehousing space, [inaudible 00:36:16] that’s kind of amusing. And so many of them are walking around going, “Oh, we don’t have the ability to do this yet.” And I’m like, “To do what, open a computer?” I mean, it was like, “We can show you. Do you not own computers somewhere along the way?” It was just so amazing to me that they were still faxing orders, or calling them in.

Austin Rose:

Yeah. Yeah, and we see that too. I mean, we still see that in… We talked about this the other day about the different types of verticals, right? Like firearms, for instance. They’re still dealing with FFL routing issues. And maybe not issues, but complicated use cases of not having manual intervention, and they’re still getting with the times. And we talked about that at [inaudible 00:37:03], when we’ve gone to [inaudible 00:37:03] in the past, and there’s been a couple other ones that have popped up that we’re just like, “Yeah. They’re still kind of like… It’s hard to get them into it. And going back to your last thing that I was thinking about was the ERP that does everything, but not everything well, right? It’s like we want to be best in class, people are so scared to have six softwares-

Kim Wren:

They are.

Austin Rose:

… they’d rather go for the one, because they think the one is going to solve everything, it’s all under one roof, everything’s good to go. But then they start to realize there’s just so many downfalls to that, because they’re not doing everything good, they’re just doing everything relatively okay. And they’re scared of the six systems, or the three and a half, like you said, and the connection, because there can be… Right? We all have problems with data, right?

Kim Wren:

Yeah.

Austin Rose:

Bugs and connection issues, things like that. Things change. But I think that’s funny, because we’re now getting to the point where I think people are starting to get a lot more comfortable, and they feel more secure of a SkuVault, a ShipStation, a Flxpoint and a Shopify and an Amazon. And it’s like we can make all that work, we’re all API-driven, we all are with the times.

Kim Wren:

Well, and I do think having these partnerships and having these types of conversations and being able to let our clients know that yeah, we do work with Flxpoint. If something comes up, we are happy to pick up the phone on your behalf and call them and talk and find out what’s going on. And back at us, where if you’re working with somebody who is a client of ours, calling… I get messages from our partners all the time that say things… We have several in Slack that message me and go, “Hey, this customer has a question on this.” And I’m like, “All right, send it to me.” And I will put it in a support document for the client and let support take over, but it’s a quick way to get that through, and the client feels happy because they didn’t have to make a second phone call to get their question answered, because the partnerships are working. And the people that are working together are in their best interest, they’re looking out for their business, so that’s helpful as well.

Austin Rose:

It’s the extension of the team.

Kim Wren:

Yeah.

Austin Rose:

I mean, we are an extension of your team. Yes, you’re buying our app, you’re buying our software, but our support, or our implementation, anybody, we help you out, and we’re humans. We’re humans, just like you are. Yeah. No, that’s a really good point. Travis, you got anything else?

Travis Mariea:

No. I mean, I always like to wrap up with Kim, is there anything that we just didn’t ask that we maybe should have, or anything we missed that is worth talking about?

Kim Wren:

No, I think we’re good. I mean, it was great talking to you guys. I love talking about e-commerce. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about, so no. I’m excited for our partnership to continue to grow. I feel like we’ve all made really good strides in the last year. Of course, prior to that we didn’t really have partnership programs, so it was hard for us to do that. But as we’re growing it, I’m excited to see where we go next and being able to work with you guys even more.

Austin Rose:

Yeah, I’m excited as well. I think it fits in perfectly. I think a lot of the customers that use you guys and use us just mold perfectly, and it was great having you on, Kim. Obviously our conversations won’t stop, we’re going to still have them, but really good insight. Obviously, a little plug for SkuVault, if you guys are ever looking to have an inventory management system inside of a warehouse management system… Did I get that right?

Kim Wren:

You did.

Austin Rose:

Okay. Then check out SkuVault, they’re a great partner of ours, we work with Flxpoint sitting here in the space. If you guys have any questions, obviously reach out to one of us. We’re more than happy to help out. Stay tuned in the next couple episodes. We’re going to be on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, and we’re going to be getting this over to YouTube. Kim, appreciate the time today.

Kim Wren:

Thanks, Austin. Thanks, Travis. It was great talking to you.

Austin Rose:

All right.

Travis Mariea:

Thanks, Kim.

Austin Rose:

Thanks, everybody.