Meet the company: Ordoro

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Jagath Narayan - OrdoroEvery merchant that has built a successful online business started by shipping their first order. Shipping one per day is pretty easy, but shipping 10, 50, 100, or 1,000 orders daily is an entirely different ball game.

Things become even more complicated as you start to work with additional suppliers, split your stock into multiple warehouses, or add dropshipping for some of your fulfilment. This is where Ordoro comes in. Their web-based software helps ecommerce merchants manage and automate these logistical processes.

We wanted to learn more about Ordoro, so we spoke with their CEO and Co-Founder, Jagath Narayan:

What is Ordoro?

Ordoro is an all-in-one ecommerce logistics platform for merchants who are growing their business. We holistically solve the logistics problems that you encounter – shipping label printing, multichannel inventory management, automated dropshipping, returns processing, and reordering – through an elegant user interface. Thousands of ecommerce merchants have fulfilled over 30,000,000 orders and scaled their businesses using Ordoro. Many of Ordoro’s customers sell on Amazon (US, Canada, UK, Europe), eBay, Walmart marketplaces and very often also have their own web stores built on Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento platforms.

What is your founding story?

I started this company in 2010 with some of my classmates while in business school. We have established our headquarters in Austin, TX, USA. I saw the need for Ordoro while working closely with an ecommerce store owner who was struggling to grow his business beyond initial traction. It soon became obvious to us that, to excel in ecommerce (or in any business), you need to be really strong with your operations. It’s important to market your site, attract traffic and sell. But if you cannot fulfill the promise you are making to the customer, your business will not last too long.

From there, we spoke to almost a hundred ecommerce merchants and realized that while there were many tools to help them with the frontend of their ecommerce – making great websites, finding products to sell, marketing tools – most of these merchants were struggling to manage their business backend using spreadsheets and antiquated software. So, we launched Ordoro with the vision of becoming the all-in-one ecommerce logistics platform to solve these problems.

As you know, ecommerce has seen immense growth over the last decade and the demand for software like Ordoro has grown along with it. Since the early days, we have grown organically primarily through word of mouth – majority of our customers find us either through referrals from current customers or by reading a positive review on any of the numerous review websites. We feel fortunate to have a loyal customer base that has helped us grow into a successful platform.

What does Ordoro do?

Ordoro Marketplace & WebstoreOrdoro focuses on solving the ecommerce logistics problem holistically. The typical workflow starts with the order getting captured on the marketplace or the webstore. Next, the merchant needs to figure out the best way to fulfil that order – Which warehouse do I ship it from (in the multi-warehouse scenario)? Which shipping carrier should I choose (based on speed or cost)? Do I have enough inventory in my warehouse to ship this order? If not, do I have an open request to restock my warehouse?

As your ecommerce business grows, you start realising that shipping orders out on time requires a lot of these different pieces to fit into the correct place. At the end of the day, it’s about honouring your promise to your customers. The best merchants are the ones who have complete control over what’s going on behind the scenes after the order is captured on their website or in the marketplace. If you can’t keep the delivery promise to your customer, no matter how effective your marketing strategy is, you are not going to get repeat customers.

Ordoro dropshipping and warehousesOrdoro takes a holistic approach towards solving this problem. We believe that shipping label printing, inventory management, dropshipping, restocking are not different problems but are just pieces of a larger puzzle. Merchants who solve this problem well are going to thrive in growing their business. We attempt to solve this problem in one shot under the same UI.

Using Ordoro’s intelligent order routing engine, merchants can configure rules to decide which orders take priority, which orders should be allocated to which warehouse – whether it’s an in house warehouse, a 3PL like FBA, or a dropshipper – and who is the best carrier to ship out that order. Ordoro’s multi-carrier shipping module will then help you print out shipping labels in bulk – some of our customers have printed upto 70,000 shipping labels in a month through our UI – and communicate the tracking number to your customers. You can use product barcode labels in Ordoro to verify that the correct product is being shipped to the correct customer and eliminate shipping errors. While you are shipping your order, behind the scenes, Ordoro is constantly updating your sales channels with the correct up-to-date stock level. Ordoro is also monitoring your stock levels and alerting you and helping you reorder products into your warehouse, whether it’s one product at a time, or a kit or bundle created using multiple products in inventory. Our analytics engine is telling you the latest statistics on your operations – order volume, fulfilment speed, efficiency, top-sellers, and all the metrics.

I assume that these workflows get more complicated the bigger the merchant becomes. How do you handle that?

You are right. We have seen that larger customers sometimes have workflows very specific to their business. 90% of our customers use Ordoro exactly as is out-of-the box. But 10% of our customers need some type of custom workflows. We recognized this early on and opened up our API in 2016 just to solve this problem. The entire functionality of Ordoro can be accessed through our open API and some of our customers have built enhanced workflows specific to their business needs using this API. In 2018, we also launched a services team to help customers further in building these type of custom workflows.

How can Ordoro help small businesses?

If you are a small business owner just getting started with ecommerce, you probably don’t need Ordoro. But if you are already getting a few orders on a daily basis, then you should definitely take a closer look at us. We have noticed that merchants who are top performers start recognizing their operational issues at around 10 orders/day. Now you are no longer a hobbyist, you are real business with real operational needs.

Even if you think you are not quite ready to start using a platform like Ordoro, talking to one of our product experts (see below) can help you understand which areas of the business you will need to focus on to drive your next lever of growth. Our team talks to hundreds of ecommerce merchants and we are good at recognizing patterns – we may be able to guide you in the right direction even if our software is not a good fit for your needs quite yet

What sets Ordoro apart from your competition?

There are many companies that provide point solutions to the ecommerce logistics problem. Some of them focus on shipping label printing, others focus on inventory management, others focus on dropshipping. As your business grows, you will need to stitch together several such apps to get a complete picture of your business and to keep things running. Ordoro solves this problem elegantly by taking a holistic approach to ecommerce logistics and giving you complete control over all these aspects of your business from within one screen.

Can you tell me about your team?

Sure. I think one of the main reasons behind Ordoro’s success is a strong team. We are a lean and mean team of only 16 people, all based here in Austin, TX. Some of my team mates have been with the company from the beginning, and our voluntary employee turnover is close to zero. When you are a small firm, it’s very important to move fast and adapt to the changing market conditions and competitive landscape. We have built a good system of gathering feedback from customers and the market on a regular basis and driving that feedback into our product development roadmap on a rapid basis. For this model to work, we need a team of strongly capable, fully committed people who can closely collaborate with each other, and I’m fortunate to have the right set of team mates to be able to pull this off. This carefully assembled team is one of the strongest points of Ordoro and what I’m most proud of.

Which platforms & carriers do you support?

Ordoro has built-in integrations with Amazon (US, Canada, UK, Europe) marketplaces and FBA, eBay, Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento and several other selling platforms. On the shipping side, Ordoro has native integrations for FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS, Canada Post and Australia Post. In addition to these, some of our Enterprise customers have built custom integrations between Ordoro and their selling platform. You can see the complete list of built-in integrations here.

What does Ordoro Cost?

Ordoro pricing starts at $499/mo for the complete ecommerce logistics feature set along with full access to our API. We also have an Express plan that starts at $59/mo that could be an easy way to experience the platform before getting into the complete feature set. For larger merchants, Ordoro also offers an Enterprise tier that comes with on-demand custom workflows and custom integrations

I’m interested – what do I do next?

You can email us at [email protected] to get in touch with a product expert. Or you can visit ordoro.com to schedule an in person walk through demo of the Ordoro software.

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