[00:00:00] Lori Boyer: Welcome to Unboxing Logistics. I’m your host, Lori Boyer from EasyPost, and today is one of our exciting, EasyPost Insider editions. Yay. These episodes are where we talk a little bit more about EasyPost products and what’s going on with EasyPost and what’s happening in the product world. A lot of our customers get super excited about this, so I have brought on today the man, the myth, the legend, Joe Dieter from our product team.
And he is going to be talking to us today about the EasyPost Enterprise offering. Really neat, really cool things happening with EasyPost Enterprise. So you’re gonna wanna buckle up for this one. Let’s talk enterprise. So, Joe, first I want us to get us all on the same page.
When people say enterprise shipper, I think a lot of times our mind immediately goes to volume, size. I’ve heard you say that you feel like that definition is outdated, and I’m curious what you mean by that and, and really I guess what you define as an enterprise shipper.
[00:01:11] Joe Dieter: Yeah. Well, Lori, you and I talk about this a lot.
I mean, being here at EasyPost, we work with lots of shippers. We work with thousands of shippers across the globe. We work with some of the shippers in the Fortune 2000 proper. And you’re right on the money that when people think of enterprise shipping, they assume enterprise shipping or enterprise shipping software is reserved for someone doing lots of volume, let’s say like a minimum of several million shipments a year, let’s say at least a few hundred thousand shipments a month.
But the reality is today, volume is just one component. It’s really, what we have observed is enterprise grade complexity. So we’re working with a number of incredible brands, some of the largest marketplaces in the world, including literally the largest marketplace in the world. And every week though, we meet new, high growing shipping operations, we call them.
But as they come to us and they start telling us about why they’re waking up with migraines every morning because of their shipping operation and supply chain current situation, we start to take notice some themes. And themes for why someone is or is not needing enterprise grade shipping software point to this not just being a volume game. It’s a complexity game.
And so we can get into what we mean by complexity, but you’ll see as we give a few examples, it’s not about volume anymore. Now that said, one quick note, 2024, we had over 22 billion parcel shipments in circulation in the US alone. So among all the warehouses in the United States, over 22 billion shipments went out the door.
Warehouses were busier than ever. That was the busiest parcel shipping season ever in recorded history. And as we look ahead year over year, we’re not decreasing in volume magically. The forecasts are that we’re continuing to grow. So volume is relevant and maybe the cause of another kind of endless chain of complexities and why someone would say, you know, ShipStation, a great product, but it’s no longer a fit for my needs, is because they’ve started to grow and they’ve started to face more and more situations throughout their shipping operation that demand a higher performing tool. It demands a tool, like for us it’s EasyPost Enterprise.
[00:03:30] Lori Boyer: I gleaned on kind of to a phrase, you said enterprise grade complexity, I think is what you said, enterprise grade complexity. Can you gimme maybe some examples? What do you mean by that? I think, you know, obviously people know when they are shipping millions and billions even of packages that they’re enterprise. But what does enterprise grade complexity look like in the real world?
[00:03:52] Joe Dieter: We’re to the point now at EasyPost, or as we have a certain size company or a company from a certain industry coming to us, we literally have a checklist internally where we’re like checking the boxes as we first start having conversations with him because here’s what we have seen most commonly with shippers that reach a point where they need something that’s truly enterprise grade shipping software.
An example. They come to us and they say, hey, we woke up one day and we realized we’re on a very old system. And we learned this as we tried to expand our warehouse network, or we’re adding another distribution center to our distribution center network.
We are upgrading how we pick, pack, and ship. Kinda the main moments within the warehouse journey. We’re, we’re starting to make modifications or make some upgrades and how we do that, maybe we’re bringing in automation and robotics. And one big, big thing that has become clear is our current shipping software is outdated. Okay. So we’ll, we’ll sometimes just start with that basic observation.
[00:04:50] Lori Boyer: Okay. So the basic observation of we have legacy software, we have old software, and we’re trying to automate, modernize in the facilities, in the warehouse. That can be what you would consider an enterprise grade complexity.
[00:05:02] Joe Dieter: One of them. Several others. Our time to label is too slow. What’s the time to label? How quickly can a packed order within our warehouse have a shipping label generated, applied, all the forms, documentation applied and it’s on its way ready for carrier pickup basically. Like most enterprise grade shippers are going to find that a major KPI or just goal within how they run their warehouse.
A goal their team has is a certain time to label speed ’cause they’re dealing with a certain volume or certain demand within certain moments of the year. And if they cannot hit their time to label goals of speed they start thinking about upgrading their software. More examples.
[00:05:42] Lori Boyer: Wait, so hold on there.
Oh, is there a benchmark for people listening of what speed they should be having at an enterprise grade kind of level that they could know like, oh, obviously it shouldn’t be taking two minutes, but you know how, how long is kind of standard? Do you know?
[00:05:59] Joe Dieter: Yeah, a absolutely. So if you are truly enterprise grade, a lot of the time you want under three seconds time to label. Or this, this is what a lot of enterprise grade shippers that come to us and talk about time to label.
Let’s say under three seconds. If you’re more upper mid market, lower enterprise. We have a specific tailored solution for that as well, but you might be more three to five seconds.
[00:06:24] Lori Boyer: Okay, great. Great insight. Super helpful.
[00:06:26] Joe Dieter: Good, good example, right?
[00:06:27] Lori Boyer: Some three second time to label. Okay.
[00:06:30] Joe Dieter: Several other complexities, and I’ll rattle through these because we hear ’em all the time and it lets us know, ah, this is an enterprise grade shipper.
They might not know yet. Hey, we’re needing to add more carriers like asap, like yesterday, but we’re realizing how challenging that is with the current tool we use. So we’re shipping a certain type of new thing to a certain part of the globe and we need to work with a certain type of new carrier, and we’re asking our current provider to quickly test spin up and have a seamless integration with that new carrier so we can start generating labels and gray shopping through them.
And it’s kind of a journey. They’re giving us a time estimate that’s a lot longer than we prefer. And then they, they come to us as, we have one of the largest multi-carrier networks and we’re perhaps the company that helped a lot of shippers become multi-carrier. So it, it’s just the reality of the complexity of becoming multi-carrier in new ways.
And enterprises have to get really multi-carrier. Often that’s international or even domestically or regional or last mile carriers. They no longer can just work with one carrier in a few service levels. So that, that’s another example. Maybe you come to us and you say, we’re starting to ship more and more perishable goods.
We are shipping things that have to be in a certain environment. They have to be a certain temperature, they have certain time sensitivity, and when they have to get one from one point to another or else our entire goods are lost or damaged. Maybe in general, shipping costs are too dang high. Every shipper of every size probably feels their shipping costs are too high.
Enterprise grade shippers though, it’s not just about that rates are more expensive than ever from carriers. It’s that they’re realizing we have all sorts of other costs that pile up. We need a lot of support. Every time we have to make one little adjustment to how we ship, we have to make an adjustment to our shipping software.
And we can’t do that. So we have to call up our shipping software vendor support line, and we’re in a support queue, and then we start getting surprise invoices as they say, okay, yes, we can address that for you. We can make that modification to your software. It’s gonna take X amount of months and it’s gonna be a lot of what we call professional service hours.
So all of a sudden all these costs are piling up. Yeah, welcome to enterprise grade complexity. A lot of folks also come to us and say, our tools are very hard to maintain. We feel like every peak season, we hit a new level of growth. We’re scaling, we’re growing. It’s exciting, but our shipping software’s never quite ready for this scale.
Our tools never feel like they’re actually finished. It never feels like they’re maintained. We got locked into a contract with a, with a large fancy, you know shipping software vendor. What they’re doing is building custom things from scratch, and they never finish building, and we’re getting charged along the way.
So this is another part of enterprise grade complexity. A couple others, but it, it, it’s so critical that unless you’re there in this enterprise grade phase, you don’t know what’s about to happen as, as you grow and scale. And it’s these sorts of complexities. We are at a point where we have to have all the key tools in our, in our order fulfillment and supply chain journey talking the same language. For example, our order management system as orders come through, has to seamlessly integrate with our warehouse management system, which has to seamlessly integrate with our ERP. We have multiple fancy and candidly expensive tools. We put in place two, streamline our supply chain, but they don’t seem to talk the same language.
They don’t seem to nicely integrate. Data isn’t flowing from one to the other. They don’t feel like they were built for each other. Most of the time they actually weren’t. So we have to have a shipping software that generates our labels and does some of the key shipping stuff that also nicely integrates and connects to our other systems that we rely on in our supply chain.
Another thing we hear more and more on a weekly basis now, we feel that the way we pick, pack, and ship in our warehouse is just manual. In other words, we, and, and some folks say we have a lot of exceptions in how we pick, pack, and ship. Okay, well, tell us about that. Well, for example, we have more and more shipments going to a certain part of the globe.
It’s only Susan in our warehouse that actually knows how to fulfill and complete the pick, pack and ship process for their shipments. So if you walk into, and this could be a incredible Fortune 2000 sophisticated brand, this could be one of the biggest companies in the world. And you go into one of their main warehouses and you see a huge pile of boxes in the corner and you say, what are those boxes?
What are they doing there? It’s, oh, those are Susan’s boxes. Okay, tell me more. Well, Susan was the only one that knows the exact labels and forms and documentation and exactly how you have to pack those boxes, ’cause they’re going to that special place. And by the way, they only get picked up the second Wednesday of every other month.
And what, what is this? This is exceptions. Where a human has to press pause on tech and how your warehouse works and has to go and do something manually. You’d be surprised how many of the most incredible, largest brands in the world, actually are running a warehouse system where there’s a Susan that is completely the dependent factor of whether or not they can even perform and, and fulfill their orders on time.
This is a really good example of what we say, manual exceptions. Outdated, clunky, or in 2026, where is, for example, AI. We, we were promised automation. We were promised no more Susan exceptions, but yet we still feel like we only have one or two people in our warehouse that actually know how to ship every single thing that has to get out of our warehouse.
So this is a very big, very big risk. If you are a large enterprise grade shipper that has these sorts of exceptions, and a lot of ’em do.
[00:11:58] Lori Boyer: I, I do. And I wanna just say, if this is you out there, don’t feel alone because it’s exactly what Joe, what you’ve been saying is so on target with people I talk to every single day who are.
How am I so big and our warehouse is still running legacy software, has manual processes going on somewhere. Has challenges adding new carriers because the scaling and the growth and as you mentioned with so many packages going out, a lot of that is people expanding. And so all, all of these challenges, the good news is if you’re not sure if you’re enterprise level, you can always talk to someone at EasyPost. If you’re an EasyPost customer.
Please reach out to your CSM to find out if maybe an enterprise tech solution is what’s gonna work best for you right now. I’m curious, you said something about, you know, pick, pack, and ship. Do you feel like it can ever really get standardized at this enterprise scale?
It’s so hard. I, I dunno. I hear so many nightmares about it. Why do you think that is?
[00:13:03] Joe Dieter: Shipping is one of the last areas of how businesses run that is by nature physical and manual. Shipping is literally how we move things from point A to point B, obviously. And what that means is there cannot be a completely digital experience and moving physical things from point A to point B.
So that’s kinda the higher level of philosophical thing. And just by that nature, it means that moving stuff is across the globe is hard and is expensive and it never goes perfectly right, it seems. This is true, but at the same time. We have stories of global retailers saving $400 million right now, the moment they do start bringing in AI.
[00:13:44] Lori Boyer: Tell me, Joe what is AI doing?
What, how are people actually using, you mentioned that. We say, oh, we hear about AI, we hear about all this, but what’s actually happening?
[00:13:53] Joe Dieter: AI is coming in to impact just about every step of what’s happening in the pick, pack, and ship journey, but there’s a few initial areas that we especially see it immediately comes in and saves time, saves money, brings efficiency.
We see even something as simple as rate shopping being massively innovated through AI. We call it AI powered rate shopping. So historically, even large shippers would strike agreements with specific carriers. They would get certain discounts based on estimated volume of a certain span of time. What AI is doing is it’s coming in and saying, according to the behavior of how you’re shipping and according to your forecast of where you’re gonna ship, we can tell you based on all the past several billion historical shipments, the exact carriers and service levels you should be using for the most cost effective way to ship, the fastest way to ship. Whatever your goals are. You wanna work with these specific carriers. You have to get a certain thing to a certain part of the country in X amount of days. What better tool than AI to take that information and say, okay, every time I will give you exactly the right label, the right carrier, the right service level you need to work with to have the most efficient shipping experience possible.
AI powered rate shopping is becoming table stakes now. Other areas are the world of just shipping analytics. And analytics has become a bigger and bigger buzzy thing over the past few years in shipping, of course. But analytics and shipping wasn’t really simplified until AI came in. So we, we have a tool called Luma AI.
What Luma can do is it can look at historically every shipment that went out the door and give you some baseline insights that you can log into every morning on dashboard and see your average cost per package, your average time in transit. You can drill into the details of the, the exact shipments that are causing delivery issues or where you’re getting surprise fees or you, you feel like they’re just, they’re not successful shipments.
You can get all the visibility you need into pass shipping performance. But what Luma also does that’s really unique is look at tomorrow. Luma is a crystal ball. Luma AI Insights forms this crystal ball view of saying, okay. Based on how we know you need to ship tomorrow, the volume shipments that you need to ship towards certain parts of the globe, we recommend for two day shipping down to the southwest part of the US you switch from this carrier and service level over to this carrier and service level.
And Luma AI tells you you will literally save 25% in costs and over 30% time in transit if you make this exact carrier and service level switch. Has that sort of precision. Luma AI can do that ’cause it was trained on billions of historical deliveries through EasyPost’s, APIs, which most of the market knows us as the creators of the first API for, for shipping and generating labels.
But as we were processing all those billions of shipments through our APIs, we were behind the scenes, could train what’s considered by third parties the most reliable shipping AI. Because it’s seen every recent shipping scenario, it’s seen all the recent shipments to Arizona that had to get there in two days from Ohio.
And so it knows, nah, you’re using FedEx to, you know, maybe you’re using X, Y, Z carrier service level and you must use FedEx today because that’s gonna be the right fit for you historically.
[00:17:07] Lori Boyer: One of the things I absolutely love about Luma AI is that, you know there is not another company that has the sheer amount of data that EasyPost has.
You could go into someone, you know, a big carrier, FedEx or UPS. Yes, they’re gonna have more shipments that have gone out, but they are restricted only to themself. They don’t have the data on all the other carriers. You can go to other shipping solutions, but their data sets are much smaller and, and EasyPost has been around for so long and has such incredible data.
Billions, as you mentioned, that these records, I, I mean, it’s just the best you can get out there in my view. So, okay. Joe, I wanna back up a little bit. You mentioned that we’re known for our APIs. And we are, everyone loves our APIs. But I wanna talk about the enterprise. We talked about complexities of enterprise. We have our EasyPost Enterprise offering, and that includes the Luma AI that you mentioned, but.
What, what is Luma or what is EasyPost Enterprise? How, how does, how do you know, I guess, first that maybe you’re the right fit for it. And how is it different than our APIs?
[00:18:23] Joe Dieter: Are you the right fit for something like EasyPost Enterprise? Well, did you resonate with some of the complexities we’ve mentioned at the top of this combo?
Right? We, we went through a series of complexities. If you can check the box on even a couple of those, you may be ready for something like EasyPost Enterprise. EasyPost Enterprise looks at all those challenges that happen as you scale and as you grow. And as you surpass a few million shipments a year even, you’re gonna have some of these challenges.
Looks at all those challenges and says, here is a high performance shipping engine to address those challenges, and it consists of a few elements. One that’s table stakes is we can handle the volume. You need a system that can take 500 k plus shipments process per hour. You need that sort of speed mashed with volume.
We work with brands doing an excess of 800 K to a million plus shipments a day. So we have a system that can handle some of the biggest demands in the world. Part of this handling all this pick, pack ship exceptions, like we mentioned, you know, the, the Susan dilemma, for example, is really about having a system like EasyPost Enterprise that has configurable business rules.
Low code scalability. Now what does that mean?
[00:19:31] Lori Boyer: Okay, those are, those are big phrases. Let’s, let’s go bring it down. So all business rules, examples.
[00:19:39] Joe Dieter: It means that the precious moment of rate shopping, choosing the right carrier and service level, getting the best rates. You need to automate that. You need to set rules around every time you are gonna ship ground to this destination, with this sort of package, we already know how we’re gonna rate shop and who we’re gonna work with. When we’re gonna go today to this part of the globe, or this or this part of the country, we have rules in place. So someone is not manually having to process, especially at this sort of volume. You can’t afford to.
You have delivery logic. You have every step, every decision you need to make about how you’re gonna ship something out of your warehouse, you can put rules in place to automate that process. And then as well, we have self-serve scalability. And this matters so much for enterprise gray shippers because they think they have all their rules and all their ducks in a row and they know exactly how they’re gonna have to ship going into peak season.
And then peak season happens and everything is, is kind of off limits and peak season in terms of something can go wrong, something un unexpected can happen. There can be a little bit of a hiccup with a carrier. So you have to be able to make changes on the fly ideally. Most enterprise grade shippers historically had to call their software vendor or send them a frantic email or text in the middle of peak and say, please, please help me.
Something happened unexpected. We’re having to make an adjustment to how we ship, to the carriers we work with, to the service levels we rely on, and we need you to come in and somehow code out that change in our system. Meanwhile, they’re on 1, 2, 3 days of downtime, which could be equivalent to millions and millions and millions of dollars lost.
We’re, we’re talking about high stakes here, and the point is this, historically enterprise grade shipping meant I have to sign a contract with a, basically a software engineering firm that’s gonna create a custom piece of software that only they can scale for me. The irony is I’m an enter enterprise grade shipper.
All I know is scale. All I know is change. All I know is the dynamic world of hitting the largest amount of parcel volume we’ve ever had to ship. I have to roll with change in un unexpected situations. I no longer can be beholden to calling up and hoping my support ticket is fulfilled quickly by a third party vendor.
Instead, I need low code functionality. And what that means is people internally within my company can make the adjustment on the fly. We can scale at our own command. So no longer do we have 20 service tickets out there to our shipping software vendor that they’re gonna take the next X amount of weeks to fulfill while we lose money during peak season. While we get a ton of very expensive surprise invoices from them, ’cause they’re billing us for all these fancy engineering hours. Instead, I can make the adjustment on the fly myself. I can have someone within my team come in and configure my EasyPost Enterprise experience to exactly what I need.
It was important to note that you could not find this sort of low code flexibility in any other enterprise shipping software to date, you couldn’t find it as we wanted this year.
[00:22:41] Lori Boyer: So even I could do it, Joe, is that what you’re saying? Not a coder, but if I knew my systems, if I knew what changes needed to be made, I could get in there and make the changes myself and keep, I loved it. I think your phrase was scale it, command, you know, whatever it was, I.
[00:22:58] Joe Dieter: At your own command.
[00:22:59] Lori Boyer: At my own command. I am able to, to make changes, so be flexible on the fly without needing to go to that middleman of talking to a another vendor.
[00:23:11] Joe Dieter: And, and having to pay the costs of constantly feeling like you have a shipping tool that’s never completely finished and never actually functions how you need it to at any given point in time.
It would be like if you contracted someone to build a house and they never actually finished the back deck, let alone the kitchen. You were living in it for years upon years, and you keep on having to send angry emails, you’re trying to be polite, please finish my kitchen so I can cook dinner for God’s sake.
And you can’t. It’s ridiculous. But that’s literally how a lot of people feel about their shipping software when they come to us.
[00:23:41] Lori Boyer: So Joe, it does, you know, obviously labels at an unbelievable speeds, at huge scale. You have the ability to make changes on the fly, add carriers, switch carriers. Are there other things that EasyPost Enterprise does or that you can do with it?
[00:23:55] Joe Dieter: Yeah, we talked about the cruciality of being a multi-carrier shipper, especially as an enterprise. When you come to us or you come to any vendor and say, listen, I need to scale and I need to step up in how high performing my software is part of what you’ll probably need is to work with certain carriers in a seamlessly integrated way.
And so easy plus enterprise offers what we really call multi-carrier automation. We have a reputation for being able to spin up test and have seamless integrations with the carriers you need, and at discounter rates. Regional, last mile. We know there’s a new kind of sea changer. There’s a new generation of carriers.
There’s Amazon shippings and UniUnis and Roadies There’s, there’s all these new carriers that larger and larger shippers want to start allocating volume to for a number of of reasons. EasyPost Enterprise is one of those unique tools that’s ready to go. It’s ready to get you the exact multi-carrier mix you need as you come in the door.
And our carrier ramp up times tend to always beat our competition, we’ve been told. You also want someone that’s compatible, that has accolades in working with carriers. So EasyPost is the 2025 Solution of the Year in terms of compatibility with FedEx. And we worked hard to have an awesome partnership with FedEx, with some of the biggest carriers in the world.
And so ask those questions. If you’re facing these enterprise grade complexities, ask those questions before you jump into an agreement and, and choose your tool. Are they considered the most compatible? Can you also automate things like labels, forms, documentation? Can you make brandable labels exactly how you want your labels to appear?
Can you handle proof of delivery or bill of ladings or invoicing or all the forms involved in shipping correctly and being in compliance? Have you automated that process? The amount of time and money most enterprise grade shippers have within the label and the forms process and the paperwork is, it’s big. Okay. So you have to have label informed automation like EPE brings. What about tracking? Do you have branded and timely tracking notifications through email and also through SMS text message that have really high open rates that tell compelling upsell stories? We have something called Advanced Tracking that connects nicely with EPE, and more and more of our enterprise grade shippers are choosing it.
They’re seeing nine to 12 times ROI when they put in timely, real time tracking and notification communication with every customer they have, like Advanced Tracking. It’s able to even upsell, additional add-on accessory type, type items. The moment someone orders something from you if, if you’re a marketplace or retailer.
Seamless integration. We talked about the pain point of needing to have your warehouse management system, your shipping software, and your order management system and your ERP speak the same language. EasyPost Enterprise really strives no matter who the partner is that you need to integrate with, we’re gonna make that seamless integration happen.
One of the last ones, support. EasyPost Enterprise has had a number of large brands come to us and say, the number one reason we’re choosing you is because our current vendor is not a true partner when we need them. Support matters when you’re an SMB online seller. But if you become an enterprise grade shipper, support becomes everything.
Because when you reach unexpected challenges, if your shipping software partner is not there, is not ready to pick up the phone. Is not ready to come over, drop everything and make the changes you need, resolve the issue you need, you will face a really big issue in terms of money and time lost. So. EPE brings in a dedicated technical support team, solution engineers that actually know everything from implementation to configuration to advanced use cases.
You have software expertise there at your beck and call, basically. You have a dedicated CSM who has interest in you having a really great experiences. You work with us. They, they can escalate things to our engineering team or to anyone we need. You have global support coverage, so different time zones, different languages, different currencies.
This, this stuff matters for enterprise grade shippers. And we bring that level of support. And this has been one of the reasons EPE has grown to become something that’s recognized as one of the one of the highest performing shipping softwares for those enterprise complexities is just that we’re a partner, not just a software vendor.
We’re a partner when you sign up with us, last thing, AI. Do you have AI in the next enterprise grade shipping software you’re choosing? Is it AI that impacts the rate shopping moment? Does it impact the visibility in the past performance as well as your future shipping performance? Does it give you all the answers of how you need to ship tomorrow in the most efficient way?
We have, as you’ve noted, something called Luma AI that is brought into working very nicely together with EPE, with EasyPost Enterprise. Luma AI is gaining a reputation within, within the industry as one of the most reliable shipping AIs. It’s the only one trained on billions of historical deliveries, as we covered. And I gotta admit, this is one of the top things we hear from enterprise shippers, especially like in the past six to 12 months, the number of shippers that come to us, and one of the first things they want to talk about is this level of AI, and we can have that conversation.
[00:29:29] Lori Boyer: If you’re seeing complexities, if you’re have challenges, if you’re scaling, if you’re, you know, having bottlenecks, if you’re dealing with relying on Susan, those are some good signals that you may be ready for an enterprise type solution rather than them more, you know, great and wonderful and used by tons, thousands and thousands of, of shippers our APIs.
But EasyPost Enterprise. Yeah. You’re like ready for the next level. I just did wanna jump in. I have to back up. Everything Joe said about the support. That can always seem like this weird add-on. Like, oh, we have great support. No, we have great support. I mean, I see the engineers, I see the support team.
I see them working late at night. Anytime anything hap, I mean, they are on and they are as invested, I feel like, as the shipper themselves. It is so impressive to see just the flexibility and the responsiveness and, and really what you said, working as a team. We have companies come in and say, we’re thinking about expanding into Norway, or we’re thinking about doing, you know, what.
The expertise and the knowledge on these teams to help advise and give information is incredible and really priceless is, is a piece. You know, we’ve got amazing tracking and speeds and all the technology. We also have the people. And that is really, really critical. I have one more question I have for you, Joe.
I’m curious about where we’re seeing EasyPost Enterprise move into the future. I know in product that you guys are always thinking ahead. What are you excited about in the next few years? What, what can people expect from EasyPost Enterprise?
[00:31:16] Joe Dieter: One on the note of AI, on the note of insights, bringing in a complete AI shipping experience into the EPE user interface. So this means when you log into the EasyPost Enterprise product, you start using this platform. Being AI enabled in what you do is there’s deeper and deeper ways. Any company in this industry, any software tool you use that’s going to be helping you with your shipping software is going to need to be making those steps of bringing in AI.
And so we’re excited to continue to do that with EasyPost Enterprise. We are really excited to continue to bring in something that is not built on empty promises. So I, I wanna kind of just make one note that it’s a pretty interesting time and that enterprise shippers have decisions to make.
There are a number of great players giving you shipping software that’s more enterprise grade. We really encourage people to ask the questions. Ask the questions about what it means to have a true partner, ask the questions about how many enterprise grade shippers can the company handle? This may seem odd, but enterprise grade shipping is something where earlier stage companies tend to be in a situation where they have to give awesome white glove experience to their few largest, largest enterprises because the demand of creating that great partnership and great experience for a volume of the world’s largest shippers is challenging for earlier stage companies.
We also see this with AI. We talked about having AI. And AI is as good as the data it’s fed on. We are the company with the most reliable APIs that process billions of shipments for lots of shippers over the past 10 plus years. So we were fortunate to have all this data to build an AI that’s as reliable as Luma AI.
If you are choosing an earlier stage company, ask the right questions. There’s some awesome new, innovative tools out there that are promising shipping AI. You really have to ask the questions about is the company ready to handle those enterprise grade complexities? Do you matter, to be candid? Are you going to be prioritized when you need to be, when you should be prioritized?
You deserve it. Are you going to be, can they handle it? These are some of the, the realities of what you need to start to ask as you think about that enterprise grade shipping tool. Do they have great integrations? Are they reliable? Do they have a history of creating shipping software that has 99.99% uptime in consecutive peak seasons.
We’re the only company that has achieved that. Those are some of the things that we’re excited to continue to answer yes to those sorts of questions and those sorts of kind of tests as perspective folks come in and wanna work with us. But we encourage you to a ask all the other awesome shipping software companies out there those questions as well. Make sure.
We’re also really excited about a product called GlobalShip. GlobalShip is a product that has really turned out to be a powerful tool for what we call internally the upper mid market to lower enterprise market. What that means is if you’re doing under a few million shipments a year, but you’re still doing volume to where an SMB tool, maybe like a Ship Station no longer is quite the right fit for you.
GlobalShip could be a really powerful tool for a number of reasons. If you need faster onboarding and deployment. If you need to be able to leverage something called EasyPost Wallet Carriers, these are the incredible relationships we have with USPS and FedEx and UPS and DHL and so on, and we get great rates and have a simplified billing experience.
If you want a modern, intuitive, slick UI. If you want to be able to see the weather and how it’s impacting every shipment as it goes in certain parts of the world. If you wanna enhance shipping insights built in and if you don’t quite feel like maybe you’re out of place of some of these enterprise grade complexities, but you know you’re growing.
You might, you know, you don’t feel like you’re a Fortune 2000 s type, complexity type shipper GlobalShip could be an incredible product for you. And EasyPost GlobalShip is a part of, of our product offering here. So we actually see more and more shippers that resonate maybe with a few of these complexities we mentioned earlier that are realizing, oh wow.
GlobalShip is an awesome fit for me. It’s within my budget. It’s a beautiful centralized interface. And as in this stage of growth I’m in as a shipper, this was the best way to get up and running and keep my systems afloat, but have that next level technology is, is what we’re seeing with GlobalShip as well.
So I gotta give a shout out to, to them.
[00:35:57] Lori Boyer: Oh, I’m glad that you added in GlobalShip because they really have a great spot. One of the things I love about EasyPost is the fact that we have offerings for pretty much a shipper in every business stage, wherever you may be, from the smallest shipper shipping out of your garage to the most masses, massive.
And as you’ve mentioned, we work with the largest marketplaces, with the, the biggest shippers that you can imagine out there, the biggest names. And there’s a product really for anywhere that you are in there because we know that things change. So if you’re not even sure which product or you know which offering is best for you, just hop on the phone.
Our solutions engineers, they’re what, they’re happy to take a look at your systems and figure out what would work just best for you right now. That’s amazing. I’m also really, really excited about the AI. I am, you all know me, I’m such an AI nerd and I’m especially excited about some of our LLM stuff that is coming out.
For dummies like me who can just say, help me make decisions. You know, I see all this data. I’m not just getting insights. I’m getting help making the right decision and, and doing it in plain freaking English that I can understand. So I just love that. That is also exciting.
[00:37:14] Joe Dieter: So recently, fancy consulting firm does pretty big widespread look across what are larger supply chain organizations, so companies that have a sizable supply chain, what are they doing about AI right now?
What’s happening? How many people are applying AI? And it turns out the data is around eight out of 10 supply chain organizations, so organizations that have a serious maybe enterprise grade supply chain, do not have a formal AI strategy, but they know they need one. If they know they need to be applying AI, and it still looks like. This was recent.
It was around 23%, and, and this was from one of the top consulting firms, did a pretty elaborate look across all the supply chains. Realized 23% have a formal AI strategy. Another firm met with all the top players or a good sampling of the top players they consider that have applied AI throughout their supply chain. Immediately on average, a 15% reduction in logistics costs a 35% improvement in how they’re managing inventory in terms of cost and and efficiency. A 65% improvement in service levels. What does that mean? Well, on time, fulfillment of orders going out the door, order accuracy, connected level of customer satisfaction. 65% improvement kind of across all these service level KPIs and goals supply chain would have.
So what this means is AI, when applied correctly, is working, is delivering. And then it also means eight out of 10 companies, we have empathy, we feel for them, are sitting there saying. Where do we even start? And I can’t tell you right now that I even have a formal strategy of how to apply AI. Is kind of what we’re hearing.
So it’s still, we’re several years into the incredible ChatGPT effects, I call it, speaking of LLMs. But we’re still so early, we’re still at this place where supply chain, one of the areas of business and society, that AI was going to save us the most amount of migraines. Give us the most powerful tools and saving and time.
Supply chain is still sitting there looking for the seamless fit of how they’re gonna bring AI into their operation. So it’s an exciting time. It’s why we do conversations like these. ’cause we see the data, we know how many companies are sitting there having to make these tough decisions of what are they gonna do about AI and how are, how are they gonna make the right decisions and not get kind of pulled into choosing a tool that promises the moon but isn’t ready to actually meet their specific needs and their specific enterprise grade complexities.
So it’s an important conversation and we know a lot of people this is a very meaningful conversation for a lot of people trying to make tough decisions right now.
[00:40:02] Lori Boyer: Yeah. You know, I just wanna piggyback off of that ’cause it’s super interesting.
I love to read the data myself and I just came across a study that, as you said, I think your numbers 23% only of companies have an AI strategy or, or are developing that, but. Individual workers, more than 80% are using AI on their own, what they call like the gray or the the dark LLMs, something like that.
And it’s what they’re doing is they want to use it anyway. And so they may be taking stuff and not being super secure, you know, using ChatGPT and not realizing they’re putting in data that they really shouldn’t be. And. Your workers are probably using LLMs. ChatGPT copilot other things with their work. And it’s so much better to get a solid program out there and to have your data where it can be secure and isn’t being put out just into big general, you know, AI tools out there. And it’s gonna be more accurate.
So I absolutely, a hundred percent, even for security reasons, recommend that you get some AI tools and get them. Because your employees are trying to use them, whether or not you even know about it. So that’s just another big piece that I think is so important.
[00:41:22] Joe Dieter: Over the past few years, a lot of shippers have come to us saying, do you have an answer for shipping analytics?
Shipping analytics, a buzzy topic in excess of 10 years now. Most industries have had slick, actual insight analytic dashboards that give you all the need to know information of how you make smarter decisions. Just about every area of how we do business, we’ve had really easy to understand analytic solutions.
Shipping has been one of the hardest areas we’ve observed for a lot of shippers to actually get quickly the information they need about how they’re gonna make smarter shipping decisions and save money and save time, and choose the right carriers from an analytics dashboard. We don’t think, especially some of the biggest enterprise grade shipping softwares all the way down to the great SMB shipping solutions, we don’t think there’s been this aha moment of how to simplify how you get really a cheat sheet of to make all the smart shipping decisions you should be making. To partner with the right carriers and partner with the right service levels and stop having so many failed deliveries and stops losing so much money on surcharges.
Analytics was supposed to be the answer to all this. We were supposed to have the magical answer of how to be the most brilliant shipper ever and no longer make all the stupid decisions that all of us have to make ’cause shipping is so hard. But the reality is shipping analytics kind of up to this point was never super easy for just about any size shipper to come in and use.
Enter something we call Luma AI Advisor. What the heck is that? It’s an advisor that’s all knowing that is looking at the behavior of all your recent shipping decisions and then live time is there for you to just type in a simple question, a simple comment, and it is there to, according to the data, makes sense of your shipping decisions and how you’re gonna make better shipping decisions tomorrow.
Luma AI Advisor is, I think, the most approachable, easy way to harness the power of shipping analytics. Shipping has more data than most industries because every stinking step of the pick, pack and ship process of the warehouse is a little data signal. Every delivery is a data signal. We have, we’re doing, but we’re swimming in nothing but kind of data up to our eyeballs in shipping, but we don’t know what to do with it.
It’s scary to look at shipping analytics ’cause there’s so much analytics. Where do we even start? You need to be able to have an all knowing advisor right there at your fingertips, right there on the side. As you’re looking at a fancy dashboard, you don’t know what, what to even, what value to get out of it.
Ask the next most basic question that comes to mind of what you wanna know, what you wanna know what carriers and service levels am I losing money on? Is my two day shipping the most cost effective two day shipping I could be choosing right now when I ship to Arizona? Whatever the question is, you might have.
You finally have, some people have said the first reliable ChatGPT over shipping. It’s finally there and it’s trained on and fully has access to all the shipping data you would have through shipping with EasyPost. So we’re really excited about this product because so many shippers came to us and said, why is, why are shipping analytics so complex?
And I’m trying to be nice to you guys because I know all, all the shipping software providers in this space that have spent years trying to build awesome shipping analytics, but they’re still complex. Welcome to why we built Luma AI Advisor. Have that seamless back and forth conversation in simple English, easy to understand words, answers.
That was the goal and we’re really excited for those that have already started using this thing and seeing cost savings, the same time savings, so.
[00:45:05] Lori Boyer: Yeah, absolutely. It is so much more than just insights and analytics. It really is answers and decisions and, and helping you act, not just think and, and so I love that.
That’s amazing. Thanks again so much for being here, Joe. This was incredible.
[00:45:22] Joe Dieter: No, thank you Lori. It’s always fun to have these convos and, and nerd out with you on shipping, so we hope this was helpful. And we’re always here, we’re excited to talk with anyone listening as as they want to chat about some of these complexities they’re facing, so.
[00:45:35] Lori Boyer: Alright, we’ll see y’all next time.
