2019 has been a massive year of change and growth here at Shippit. With merchants using Shippit growing three times faster than the broader Australian online retail market this year, we couldn’t be prouder to share some of the things we’ve done to also make 2019 a massive year!
Many of the changes we made have been tweaks under the hood, improving the reliability and usability of our app. Some of these initiatives included:
- We made autocorrecting address errors in new orders even easier
- We improved the address book with international addresses
- We made connecting an Australia Post eParcel account simpler
- We gave customers more control over their branding
It hasn’t all been little bits and pieces though, we’ve also managed to fit in some pretty major improvements and projects throughout the year. These changes go a long way towards helping our merchants grow and improve their customer experience.
Shippit customers can now go global
For the first time, this year we introduced our own international shipping rates thanks to our partnership with Seko and InXpress. This means that our users no longer have to connect their own international shipping account (though that’s still an option!) and can take advantage of our competitive rates to reach customers all around the globe.
If your business has a presence across the Tasman, we also opened even more ways to ship within New Zealand, with your NZ Post account now plugging directly into your Shippit account.
New shipping options to optimise delivery
We expanded our range of courier service options, giving merchants instant access to same day and next day delivery at the flick of a switch—helping you to delight customers with fast delivery experiences. Yellow On Demand enables merchants to offer on-demand, 90-minute deliveries at the checkout, while our Allied Express Same Day service offers 3-4 hour delivery windows. For reliable next day delivery, we enabled TNT Overnight Express and InXpress.
Better integration into the eCommerce ecosystem
As part of our efforts to continuously enhance our core product, we’ve improved our eCommerce integrations. Merchants using the BigCommerce platform can now offer their customers real-time shipping quotes. Additionally, we made Shippit available to merchants using platforms without a direct integration so you can send orders to Shippit by CSV via FTP upload. This means we can now support shipping orders from literally any shopping cart.
To expand our connectivity with warehouse and inventory management tools, we added an integration with PeopleVox and made it easier for merchants using Cin7 to fulfil orders from multiple locations using Shippit. Hello endless aisle!
The launch of Shippit Returns
In October this year, we launched our first entirely new product since the launch of the Shippit app way back in 2015. After an extensive pilot with The Athlete’s Foot and Puma, we introduced Shippit Returns for merchants using Shopify or Magento 2.
Shippit Returns gives merchants their very own branded, self-service online returns portal to simplify returns for their staff and customers. It’s still early days but initial feedback is showing that customers love the ease and simplicity of Shippit Returns.
2020 vision
In addition to investments in our product to improve our customer experience, it’s also been a big year for Shippit.
In 2019, we increased both our employee and customer numbers by almost 70%. We also increased the number of bookings made on the Shippit platform by a massive 90% compared to the same time period in 2018. Last month we announced a pre-series B funding round of $5.3 million.
We were honoured to rank seventh in LinkedIn Top Startups 2019, 22 in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 2019 Australia Awards and 249 in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2019. Shippit also became a WORK180 endorsed employer for supporting diversity, inclusion and equality.
All of this growth means that next year is set to be even bigger and better. We have big plans for 2020. After four years of massive expansion, we’re doubling down on our technology and engineering to scale in Australia and increase our presence in Asia.
Customers can also look forward to further improvements to our core Shippit product—making it even more reliable, easy to use and enriching the functionality so you can get more ship done. Watch this space for more info on our product roadmap next year.
We couldn’t do what we do without our amazing customers. Here’s to all of you for a fantastic 2019 and an even better 2020 to come!