Curated

“Flxpoint is adding immense value from a merchandising and catalog perspective. We’re leveraging pre-built and defined rules into our catalog, which makes things a lot easier.”

THE PROBLEM

With a mission to bring the personal experience back into the buying process, Curated has a business model for buyers who are seeking an expert’s assistance with their purchase.

In the early days, Curated was 100% reliant on an overseas fulfillment team to manually handle order placement to support their sales team. As the market and company began to rapidly expand, there was a need to advance their tech stack by automating the fulfillment network to better support their customers and expand into new verticals.  

THE SOLUTION

Flxpoint helped Curated scale as a business when it came time to prioritizing the backend of their marketplace, curated.com. By utilizing Flxpoint, Curated was able to build a robust dropship business, leveraging Flxpoint’s flexible pre-built integrations, API, and EDI.

“We’re leveraging Flxpoint’s pre-built and defined rules into our catalog, which makes things a lot easier. For example, when it comes to inventory availability, we can feel confident it is up-to-date. We’re syncing some feeds every 15 minutes so that we can feel really confident that what we’re listing is actually in stock.”

In addition to the platform, Flxpoint’s support has played a huge part of Curated’s success. Flxpoint’s team member Ryan was instrumental when it came to learning the platform, getting up to speed on EDI, and much more.

Curated launched numerous categories and grew quickly, so Ryan’s twice-a-week meetings with the Curated team became instrumental with expert advice from EDI mapping to more easier, straightforward mapping. During the first year, Curated found a lot of value with the additional support provided by Flxpoint, but now they are coming to a place where they can manage their Flxpoint operations internally.

IMPLEMENTATION

By implementing Flxpoint, Curated was able to automate their marketplace from listings to orders, enabling them to launch into new categories, such as coffee, kitchen, baby gear, grills and more by facilitating dropship at scale. Additionally, Curated leverages Flxpoint to pull in product data from third-party retailers for their marketplace to ensure the most up-to-date inventory availability.

Onboarding individual vendors/suppliers can take anywhere from one day to four months depending on a variety of factors, including quality of supplier data, preferred method of integration, communications times with the vendor/supplier, etc.

If Flxpoint is integrating with a Shopify or BigCommerce store to pull in inventory data, it can take as little as one day to accomplish. If it’s a more complex EDI integration, this can take longer.

RESULTS

By utilizing Flxpoint, Curated has been able to scale their dropship business with the ability to onboard new vendors quickly with Flxpoint’s pre-built integrations, also making it possible for Curated to research, develop and launch new categories quickly. In one year, Curated was able to onboard 180 vendors, and there are no plans to slow down. 

Since starting in winter sports, Curated has been able to scale and expand to coffee, kitchen, grills, baby products, etc. Thanks to Flxpoint, Curated’s technology allows them to maintain this growth quickly with confidence.

“Flxpoint really came in when we needed to establish more traditional relationships with our manufacturers and build the marketplace strategy for these third-party retailers.”

CONCLUSION

Flxpoint has been instrumental in helping Curated scale as a business, automating the order-to-cash cycle, enabling the launch of new categories, and improving the merchandising process. With Flxpoint, Curated has been able to take its business to new heights, providing customers with a wide range of products and services.