How did you initially get interested in e-commerce, particularly the checkout and delivery experience? What made you so excited about it to build a business around it?

I was first exposed to the world of e-commerce at a very young age, I opened an ebay account to sell my unwanted Christmas toys as a child. I continued selling on marketplaces and my own websites all the way through middle school then high school, and eventually worked at an automotive parts company before college. Across these experiences, I felt the pains that small and larger DTC and B2B brands encounter every day - how do you manage your inventory effectively, efficiently ship your products, and how do you track and communicate everything with every customer on every order? No matter the size, brands were struggling to manage all the minutiae of meeting customer expectations, keeping up with their growth, coordinating disparate partners, and doing so at scale.

These pains were one of the largest sources of costs and headaches, while also being one of the biggest detractors in my reviews and customer NPS. 

Living this problem first hand is what drove me to co-found Stord with Jacob Boudreau. Together we sought to find a single platform that brands could tap into, an “infrastructure as a service”, that would unify the fractured ecosystem of commerce enablement and provide brands with the necessary physical fulfillment capabilities and technologies to improve cart conversions. Ultimately unlocking the same consumer experience provided by the massive ecommerce giants, but now for businesses of all sizes. The vision was that, with this “Prime-like” checkout and delivery ability, we could level the playing field, and help brands drive higher cart conversion, lower costs, and ensure happier consumers. 

What’s one lesson a brand can learn from a Stord customer on improving consumer experience?

The biggest lesson a brand can learn from Stord customers is this - to excel at providing excellent customer experience you must focus on everything for every order and nail it every time. Unfortunately, brands can no longer grow simply because of a great product, or great marketing, or great customer service. If your packages arrive late, customers will go elsewhere. Slow and expensive shipping options? Customers will go somewhere else. Damaged products. Wrong orders. Out of stock messages. The list is massive. In the crowded e-commerce space, if you are not prepared you will lose customers to someone else.

That said, 59% of US consumers are loyal to a brand for life once that loyalty is earned, so the reward of getting everything right is massive. That is what we focus on providing for our customers, helping them ensure they have the tools they need to help drive cart conversions and follow through with the necessary post-purchase communication, deliver their orders flawlessly and facilitate any post-delivery resolutions with ease.

To grow your e-commerce business you absolutely must sweat the small stuff, and find partners you can trust to help because doing this alone is a truly daunting task.

What is one general misconception, or aspect that D2C brands get wrong, when it comes to managing their growth?

When scaling for growth, most brands fall short because their infrastructure is not as scalable as their product.  While they hope to earn massive growth and they invest in the product and the marketing to achieve that growth - the efforts to meet and sustain that growth from an operational perspective is ignored.

Understandably, early on brands typically opt for the cheapest solutions to get started, thereby they cobble together solutions across many different providers, and create a massive headache for themselves,  their team, and their customers down the road.

It isn’t surprising that many fall into this trap. Particularly for first time founders, how could they know how to develop deep relationships across multiple carriers? Or how to manage their inventory effectively? How do you handle exceptions when an order doesn’t go as planned, and how do you manage the communication with your customer when it happens? These are learnings that are hard won and even if you have experienced the problem, you may not know that there are solutions out there.

So, my advice to DTC founders is to plan for the growth you expect, as early as you are able to. Educate yourself on the systems and solutions you will need and invest in partnerships with companies that know more about this field and can scale with you. Your consumer experience is made up of more than just the quality of the product and the marketing - if you can’t reliably get your products to your end consumers, it won’t matter how great the product is - that crucial planning is something we focus on extensively at Stord.

What unique advantages do brands partnering with Stord get that those not partnered don’t get?

We have spent the better part of a decade building all the systems, technologies, and physical infrastructure so that any brand can compete and deliver the same consumer experience that customers have grown to expect.

Prime and other massive multinational companies have conditioned consumers to expect 2-day delivery, flawless communication, and intuitive systems to accelerate the cart transaction and the post-purchase exception handling. 

And that is exactly what we have built. Not only do we have fulfillment centers across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Netherlands; we also have a huge suite of technological solutions to maximize your consumer experience while safeguarding your margins. We have solutions to help select the most cost-effective parcel option for every order across national and local carriers. We have intelligent warehousing models to help determine the best locations for your products to meet customer demand. We provide estimated delivery dates and shipment protection tools to help communicate and increase cart conversion. We have order routing and workflows so you can select the best strategies to fulfill for your customers.

In essence, Stord is a fully integrated solution to ensure your consumers always get the best experience on every order every time. No more cobbled together partners and disparate systems - one team, one technology, one company working in perfect concert with yours to help you grow your business.