If you ship USPS, your costs are going up for pretty much all USPS shipping services - Express Mail, Priority Mail, Parcel Select, Parcel Return Services, First Class Mail, Standard, Package Services. Read more

This Procrastinators Guide to Holiday Importing was written by our executive team and marketing really thanks Saul Smith, Shipwire Chief Logistics Officer, for really giving us some great real-world data to help guide merchants.

If you are thinking about importing inventory, whether it be toys, electronics or apparel for Holiday sales in 2008 it is time to review your product sources, put in orders and start figuring out the most cost effective method of getting your inventory to the right warehouse.

You’re probably saying, wait…its March…You have to be kidding me. Sorry to burst your bubble. If you import, getting over the ‘08 holiday bah-humbugs early is critical!

One of the dirty little secrets of logistics is that there is a glut of space available during the first 6 months of the year and more merchandise than space the second six months of the year. It doesn’t matter if your shipping by boat, train, plane, truck or your having Tom Tuttle from Tacoma Washington hand deliver it for you. The closer you get to September and October the more expensive rates get and the harder it is to meet your delivery time lines. Read more

January 24, 2008 Football playoffs are upon us, and the Superbowl is looming large for many sports fans. Every January we can rest assured that there will be big screen TVs tuned in across America trying to figure out what was more exciting, the games or the commercials. However, if you are not careful, you just may miss another annual tradition in shipping.

January marks the return of the annual shipping rate increases from FedEx, UPS and the other parcel carriers. The annual carrier rate hike typically gets very minimal press or analyst exposure outside the shipping and logistics industry. That said, forums and blogs with retail business readership tend to heat up, and many business owners take a second look at their carrier account “discounts”. At Shipwire, we see business discounts as a distraction at best and clearly the wrong place for retailers to be focusing their attention. True shipping cost savings are not found in a carrier discount – they are found by locating inventory closer to your customer and gaining economies of scale. Read more

January 18, 2008 Concerns about global warming and finite fuel sources have many consumers and business owners concerned about the impact of the products and services they consume. For retail merchants, the bottom line and the environmental impact are intertwined and directly correlate to product shipping costs. For purposes of this article we’ll ignore manufacturing, which should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Absent manufacture, a retail organizations’ major environmental impact is the carbon footprint of their storage (warehouse) and shipping (order fulfillment and delivery). This article seeks to call out a few relatively simple changes that will be better for the environment, customer relations and your businesses’ bottom line. Read more

Shipwire’s goal is to let retail businesses focus on growth by removing the hassle of shipping and storage. It is time that cash-strapped Web retail businesses had a global network of warehouses that can be plugged into their Web sites with no up-front fees, no long-term contracts and straight-forward storage and shipping pricing.

The small business Web retail revolution has been evolving for 10 years.

• 1996 eBay® created a marketplace and spawned an industry of home eBay sellers.
• 2000 Yahoo!® Stores gave businesses an easy-to-use online store.
• 2002 PayPal®, experiencing record growth by solving the online payment problem, is acquired by eBay.
• 2003 Google Adwords® makes finding new customers easy and cost effective.
• 2005 Chinese trade barriers are loosened making it easy for importers to source manufacturing and bring product into the Los Angeles Port.

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Shipwire gives struggling drop shippers an easy path to business growth.

“Drop Shipping” is when a web retailer populates an online store full of another companies products. When the order is placed through the drop shipper’s website, the order is routed to the company with inventory which handles shipping and fulfillment. Drop Shippers are a “middle wo/man” who makes very small amounts of margin and often times have to handle the customer support when there are shipping problems.

If you are a struggling drop shipper. Here is an easy way to gain significantly more margin, leverage the online store you have struggled to develop and drive traffic to and still not experience the frustrations of inventory storage and shipping. Read more

A trend that we’re monitoring at Shipwire is the growing pattern of international customers buying from U.S. merchants and the frustrations merchants have fulfilling this demand. If you go to the eBay forums you’ll see all sorts of seller frustration for fulfilling orders to Canada and Europe.

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In 1997, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, issued a ground-breaking position paper. “Vision 2010,” as it was called, described the future of the military in the post-Cold War world. Regarded then and now as a landmark statement, the paper tried to enumerate the future of the armed services in a new world where, in contrast to the past, when there were a number of hard targets, including, principally, the Soviet Union, the enemy was now ambiguous and the need for mobile logistics and shipping capability greater than ever before.To be sure, General Shalikashvili and the other authors of that report devoted a considerable amount of attention to the vital role of logistics in the new post-Cold War world. Sounding like the logistically astute CEO that he was, Shalikashvili envisioned a future of “total visibility of all people and materiel, so as to instill confidence in the troops with definite information about when and where goods would be delivered [my italics].” The logistics guesswork and improvisation of the past was unacceptable. Read more