Trends & the future of eCommerce: A Q&A with ShipBob CMO Casey Armstrong
After announcing our integration with ShipBob earlier this month, we sat down with ShipBob CMO Casey Armstrong to discuss current eCommerce trends and what the future of fulfillment looks like. Following are highlights of our conversation:
Tell us a little about ShipBob and your role.
At ShipBob, we bring two-day and three-day shipping to over 3,500 eCommerce brands of all sizes, from 200 orders per month to 100,000 orders per month. We accomplish this through our distributed fulfillment center network across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, which are all run by our warehouse management system.
In my role, I am the Chief Marketing Officer, where I oversee all things marketing and partnerships. One of the many things I love about ShipBob is how we encourage people to get involved in projects outside of their team's core focus, such as sales, customer support, and actually picking and packing orders.
How do you see eCommerce shifting today? How has COVID-19 altered these shifts?
It has been fascinating to watch the shift occur both top-down and bottoms-up. For example, Pepsi launching Snacks.com – seemingly in weeks – when they had never sold direct-to-consumer. For bottoms-up, consumers have changed their behaviors very quickly. We went from high teens to nearly 30% eCommerce penetration in months. From our vantage point, we have seen several months straight of Black Friday/Cyber Monday-level volume, and that is directly through these eCommerce brands' websites powered by the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce, not through Amazon. I am bullish on that behavior sticking, where the masses are more comfortable buying directly from their favorite brands online, and our goal is to make brands and end consumers more comfortable with a world-class fulfillment experience after they buy.
What impacts has COVID-19 had across your customer base?
Of course there are brands and industries that run the spectrum from thriving to dying, but the impacts of COVID-19 that stand out to me most are: 1) being action-oriented and 2) giving.
For being action-oriented, I already shared Pepsi, but we have a lot of customers doing the same. For example, Piper Wai rolled out its cleansing hand sanitizer gel in just weeks. For giving, we have countless examples from our customers, like Verb Energy, who has donated over 500,000 energy bars to frontline workers around the United States.
In light of this impact, what advice do you have for retailers who want to adjust to the next normal?
Nobody knows what the future holds, but something that will never change is having a strong relationship with your customers. Actually picking up the phone and talking to them, understanding what they are going through, why they buy from you, what they are looking for – that will never not help you and your business.
Want to learn more about Happy Returns’ integration with ShipBob? Tune into our webinar on June 4, How ShipBob merchants keep more sales and cut returns costs with Happy Returns.
Caitlin Roberson
VP of Marketing
Caitlin Roberson is the Vice President of Marketing at Happy Returns. Previously, she served as Director of Enterprise Marketing at Lyft and Partner at top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Before that, she started and sold a content marketing agency.
