EasyPost Insider: Introducing Forge, a White-Label Shipping Solution, With Brittany Williams From EasyPost - Ep. 61
In This Episode
In this EasyPost Insider episode of Unboxing Logistics, host Lori Boyer sits down with Senior Product Manager Brittany Williams to unveil Forge, EasyPost’s newest product. Built for 3PLs, marketplaces, tech companies, and carriers, Forge offers a white-label shipping solution that makes it easy to onboard customers, manage subaccounts, and access detailed analytics—all without burdening your dev team. Whether you want to enable new carriers with a click or centralize billing, Forge simplifies complex operations with powerful admin tools and best-in-class APIs.
Forge simplifies shipping infrastructure for businesses with complex customer networks
"Forge is EasyPost’s solution for businesses that want to white label our shipping technology into their own products and services . . . it’s about bringing more value to your customers and your team without time waste."
Admin tools and analytics are the standout features
"I have two top contenders in terms of features. First is Forge's administrative tools around customer management . . . The second feature to call out is the analytics. I think EasyPost does a lot of things really well, but analytics is one of those things that we do truly better than anybody else."
You can get started in minutes—with no added integration if you’re already an EasyPost customer
"[Y]ou could begin creating customer records in hour one, minute one . . . if you're an existing customer, and you want to upgrade your dashboard to the Forge dashboard, there is no lift . . ."
Links
Transcript
Lori Boyer 00:00
Welcome to Unboxing Logistics. I'm your host, Lori Boyer, and I am excited today because we have got one of our EasyPost Insider editions. Those are episodes where we get to introduce cool new things that are going on behind the scenes at EasyPost. And we've got a really, really new, fun, exciting product that we are gonna be introducing today.
And so, I brought on one of our senior product managers to walk us through the whole deal. Let's find out if this is something that works for you and, and might be a right fit for your company. Brittany Williams. Brittany, can you introduce yourself?
Brittany Williams 00:37
Yeah, I am an ecommerce and parcel shipping product manager through and through.
I've been doing this for 10 years, and I've worked on all sides of the industry. I started within direct consumer shipping, shout out to my pals over at Lulu's, and have been with EasyPost for the last few years, creating technology to make shipping simpler. I'm also an ecommerce business owner myself, and I online shop a lot. So, definitely many layers in the ecommerce industry for me.
Lori Boyer 01:07
Yeah, Brittany has been around and has seen it all. She does incredible work on the product side, so I'm really excited to hear from her today. We're gonna let be hearing about EasyPost Forge, right? This is the product that you've been working on buried in, sleeping, Forge, coming out of your eyes and ears, everything else.
So, in a nutshell, Brittany, what is EasyPost Forge?
Brittany Williams 01:31
Forge is EasyPost's solution for businesses that want to white label our shipping technology into their own products and services. But, even more than that, it is a sophisticated administrative tool where everyday business teams can onboard and manage your customers and gain unparalleled access to analytics about what's happening on your, on your shipping offering with your customers.
So in a sentence, it's about you know, bringing more value to your customers and your team without time waste.
Lori Boyer 02:04
Okay, so let's pretend I'm a 3PL. What, what would this look like? Like, give me a kind of practical application.
Brittany Williams 02:12
Yeah, so 3PL they manage, they often manage brands and retailers, and each one of those brands could be represented as a customer or a sub account within Forge. What they could do is create these customer records, assign carriers to that customer through the platform. They don't need developer team to do this. And then at its core, of course, Forge is built on top of EasyPost's, core API suite. So, we've got the highest uptime year after year after year, most reliable APIs.
You get access to all of that, plus the customer management pieces that help you manage each of your brands in your 3PL network, and then also view collectively like how the business is doing across all your brands. So that's the 3PL I would say. Yeah.
Lori Boyer 03:00
So if I'm, you know, Lori Boyer, 3PL or, or let's say I'm a marketplace or, or anyone who deals with a lot of shippers, right?
Would they then, are you saying the shippers themselves, it would, they would have access or, or we'd have access for the tools for all of the, the shipping APIs, the, the label printing, all of that. But it would look like it's coming from Lori Boyer, not from EasyPost, right?
Brittany Williams 03:24
Right. Yeah. So what you do is you, you. We assume that you've got some application that is where the shipping's happening, some some service or product external to EasyPost. You're basically plugging in the EasyPost API suite and customer management into that product where your customers live and interact. And then Forge becomes your admin tool where your team members can go in and maybe expedite onboarding customers by doing it through our platform and getting insight into everything that's going on with that customer, enabling-disabling carriers.
I know a common pain point that I've heard, for example, is, there's a high demand for random carriers. Like hey, I need carrier B, you know, MR. 3PL or whoever. And to add that could be a huge lift for a business.
You gotta integrate with that carrier, do all these things, or now hear me out. You can go into the dashboard and click a button and enable it for that customer. So yeah, I think at its core we've, our objective was to build something that reduces overhead and cumbersome processes, and it's a million different point solutions. Like, you have one vendor for this and another vendor for that. It's truly everything you need, all in one platform, with the best APIs underlying it.
Lori Boyer 04:44
Okay, awesome. So what was sort of the spark that, that kind of created, this? Is it, you were hearing pain points from customers. Why? Why did we go down this route?
Brittany Williams 04:53
Our business, it turns out, was really split down the middle with on one side we had customers who were direct to consumer shippers, retailers, brands, just shipping packages to their customers who needed reliable APIs, multiple carriers, things like that. But on the other half of our customer base, we found that it was actually other businesses who were wanting to create their own shipping solution in their own unique way. And they were using EasyPost to help reduce the lift and burden to build out things like whatever it is, insurance, you know, carriers you name it. And the challenges across these two groups are totally different.
Like on the one side you need performance, you need flexibility and speed to delivery, all these things. But for our white label group, they need to bring value to their customers. They need to be competitive in the market, and they need to do all these things without wasting a ton of dev time and a ton of administrative overhead. So. Yeah really it's like to serve these two groups well, we had, we made the strategic choice to basically branch it off and tailor solutions for each segment.
Lori Boyer 06:05
So then what, what are the groups in this segment? If you could list them out, what, what are the typical, you know, use case scenarios here?
Brittany Williams 06:12
Well, I think Forge is built for, you know, 3PLs. You've called that one out already. Marketplaces, technology companies just creating a new product or service, even carriers, you know, anybody who is going out there in the world, serving businesses who are shipping. If you're trying to improve shipping, like you're, you're, you're doing what EasyPost is trying to do in a sense, which is to make shipping simpler, to delight your customers who are using carrier services and things like that's, that's really who this product is for.
Lori Boyer 06:46
Okay, perfect.
Are there any certain features? So if we're talking here, EasyPost Forge, do you have any pet secret favorites or, or just are you gonna be Brittany, who's, I love all my children equally. Oh, what are your favorite features?
Brittany Williams 07:02
No, I definitely love some children more, more than others.
Yeah, I have two top contenders in terms of features. First is Forge's administrative tools around customer management. So any customer of the business or business that signs up for your service or product can be represented as one of these subaccounts. And Forge has a subaccount management piece to it, where non-business or non-developer roles like support agents, finance team members, you name it, just non-developers can go in and onboard and manage those customers.
So that's one. The second feature to call out is the analytics. I think EasyPost does a lot of things really well, but analytics is one of those things that we do truly better than anybody else. And there's out-of-the-box analytics in this product that you know, anybody who's building something knows or creating a service knows how important it is to make data-driven decisions.
So those are the two standout features, I think, of Forge.
Lori Boyer 08:09
Okay. Brittany, I'm gonna dig into those features here soon. I, I wanna hear a little bit more about, you know, subaccounts and management and analytics. But, first I wanna hear a little bit about simplification. I feel like here in logistics sometimes we really over complicate things.
We get a lot of rules on stuff and I, I feels like one of the goals of Forge is to simplify. Does it simplify? How does that work?
Brittany Williams 08:32
Absolutely, it does. In short it allows for businesses to have a one-stop shop. You know, logistics operations are complicated enough as you called out without introducing a bunch of different vendors with point solutions to each part of your operation.
You know, you got carrier enablement, buying labels, tracking and insurance customer management analytics, like it compounds into this beast of a thing that you have to maintain. And the value of Forge is that it consolidates all of your needs in, in one sophisticated platform design for, you know, your development team, but also your, your business teams together.
So yeah. One stop shop.
Lori Boyer 09:12
What kind of data are we talking? Well, what, what can I expect to get from it?
Brittany Williams 09:16
Well, there's two types of experiences we have in this dashboard. The first is parcel related data. So this is things like packages purchased, average cost, time in transit information, anything to do with the parcel activity and shipping activity of your entire network. Or we can drill into like specific sub-accounts and see exactly what their breakdown is.
But when we were interviewing customers, when we were planning this product, we learned that there is a, there was a high demand for developer insights. So there's also technical performance analytics. And what I mean by that is like API health metrics where you can go in and see four specific endpoints that you've integrated with. What are the number of events? What are the errors in response times? So that way if something goes wrong and, and something's not working quite right, you can quickly understand what the error is. Or, you know, just generally what is the health of your API integration with EasyPost? So those are the two angles that we've taken for analytics in this product.
Lori Boyer 10:24
I love it. Visibility is so important. We can't make good decisions, and really any decisions unless we actually know what's going on. And I know that as I talk to people, there's kind of this uneasiness. So you sometimes feel like I think it's going well, or, you know, so having those, that visibility is massive.
Subaccount. Anything else you wanted to say on that? You shared that pretty well. Is there anything else you, we missed?
Brittany Williams 10:50
There's all kinds of great experiences you can build for your customers. And some, some ones that are really easy to enable are things like customer branding where, we've got a branding product where you can go in and actually set that up for your customers if you wanted, where it's like their logo and their color scheme and their tracking pages.
So that's one. Quickly enabled disabled carriers for specific customers is the big one. That's one of the biggest challenges actually, is. When you have a customer who says that they need a specific carrier, it should not be a challenge when there's solutions like ours that have already built the integration and you just need to click it on.
So I think all in all those, those cover the big pieces. The only, the, actually the last one I'll say is billing management. So EasyPost, like the Forge product allows you to choose to centralize billing to your one account or the flexibility to have EasyPost managed billing on your behalf. So both of those are options that we have and where, it's kind split down the line between whether a customer wants to maintain billing control of postage and fees versus like, I don't want the headache of managing that. Can you do it for me? So yeah, both those things are, are options within Forge.
Lori Boyer 12:07
That's awesome. And I just wanted to say, you threw a tiny thing in there that like stood out to me. Branded tracking. If you are a shipper at all, even if you're in ecommerce, just listening in, branded tracking is a massive tool for you to use for brand awareness. Tracking messages are, by far, opened way more frequently than any other kind of marketing type message. And getting your brand out there, your logo, your name, and having that kind of repetition is massive.
I've worked my whole career in, in brand management and in brand awareness and leadership, and that is huge and a really easy thing to do. So had to shout that out.
What about one of the things that EasyPost is kind of known for is our lack of downtime and, and the ability to kind of avoid downtime. How does that work with Forge is, you know, does that, is that still in play here?
Brittany Williams 13:03
Absolutely. So as I said earlier, Forge is built on top of the EasyPost Core API suite, which has the 99.99% uptime year after year after year. The only company who can claim that.
Basically what you get when you white label these APIs is that then you can tell your customers, I have 99.99% uptime because under the hood it's our APIs. So it's really a value add for your own business. You know, even a few minutes of downtime in a warehouse can significantly disrupt every sort of system connected to fulfillment.
So yeah, I think that it's becoming increasingly more important, if you're building a service for ecommerce to have reliable, a reliable product. And Forge allows you to do that because EasyPost core APIs are, are the best in class really.
Lori Boyer 13:58
Sounds like basically any of the value props that EasyPost brings, you can now claim them as your own. And that's the, the beauty of a white label type product.
So any early, you know, success stories? I know that it's barely kicked off, but any, anything that you can share with us on that front?
Brittany Williams 14:17
Yeah. It is fairly new still. I think for me, the biggest wins have been in the before and after conversations with some of our customers.
When, when we went out to go design this product and, and create it, we met with a ton of our customers and collected all the information they had. What are your challenges? What are your pain points? What do you wish you had that you don't have today? We, we got all those in, you know, interviews last year and then, in meeting with those same customers again and showing off Forge, you get like goosebumps. And how excited and happy people are to see what we built. That. It truly does tailor it to those challenges that we know that they've suffered from. So even though it's still a relatively new, you know, young product, I think that the feedback we've gotten so far has been like phenomenal, really.
Lori Boyer 15:09
That one of the things that I am always so impressed with you, with your team, the product team here at EasyPost, is how much you listen to the customer and really, really take into account their needs and their pains. And that's just kudos to you guys because you do an incredible job there.
Okay, so Brittany, couple last questions. How does somebody know if maybe it's the right time to look at Forge or, you know, are there kind of flags they should look for that this might be right for them?
Brittany Williams 15:39
I would say reflect on what your, what value you're trying to bring to your customers in the next year. Reflect on how your development resources have been spent, historically. Is it a lot, you know, a lot of maintenance costs, a lot of research and development for, for carriers? You know, if you're, if you're spending all your time on these sort of fundamental pieces rather than the unique product that you're creating for your customers, then I think Forge is the right time for you.
If you struggle, if you're, if your business teams struggle with understanding how your, how your customers are shipping or what their costs are, or maybe how to optimize the offering you have, like any of those challenges can be solved with Forge.
Lori Boyer 16:22
Another question I would ask if I was looking at new software myself:
what kind of development team should I have? Do I, do I need a large team, and can I get a buy with a small team? What, you know, what kind of technical ability do I need on my side?
Brittany Williams 16:37
It's relatively low lift, really. The Forge platform itself cuts down on any maintenance costs that you might have once you've finished the initial integration with our APIs.
So, there's still an element of, I wanna use the, like you're gonna mix and match different APIs that we have to get your shipping offering. Buying labels, scheduling pickups. You, you kind of, the world is your oyster. We've, we've got an API for it all. Insurance, you know, anything. But when it comes to customer onboarding and then maintenance over time, there really is no cost.
We, we own the maintenance of these things, so it's like unburden yourself on that. The most you have to do is just integrate with us initially and then anytime a carrier changes a compliance rule or something like that, that's on us to update and you just benefit from, from using us. As, yeah,
Lori Boyer 17:31
I love that because I'm always like, oh, the fewer engineers, I need, the better. But don't tell my husband 'cause he's an engineer. Not at EasyPost, but he would hate it if I was writing off his engineer needs. So I think that's awesome.
One other thing, you mentioned onboarding, you were talking customer onboarding, but that made me think how long of a process is it if you're wanting to get Forge? How long does that take typically?
Brittany Williams 17:55
To actually get access to Forge is minutes. We, we can enable your account instantly. And you could begin creating customer records from within the tool in hour one, minute one. And then it's really up to you. It really depends on the complexity of what you're trying to build in your, what service you're trying to provide.
It could be something as simple as like, a two week sprint to get to use our shipment API for your customers, or something like that. So I think it varies definitely, depending on how complicated your own product and service is. But it's low lift, generally. Yeah.
Lori Boyer 18:31
Perfect. Okay. Is there anything I've missed?
Anything that you wanna cover or, or something amazing about Forge that you feel like you wanna share?
Brittany Williams 18:39
You know, like, we covered a lot of great things. I think this is just the beginning. I would just, you know, remind the audience that this is a very new product, and we've got some incredible plans for it. So if you like what you see now, it only gets better from here.
Lori Boyer 18:55
But wait.
I love that Brittany, and that is so true. And again, I said it earlier, I called out our product team, but it is, it is really true. I've worked in multiple companies. The product team at EasyPost is phenomenal when it comes to feedback and trying to implement things. So getting in early kind of on a product like this, fantastic chance to provide feedback and to also, you know, be able to kind of mold how the product evolves over time.
So, okay. If people are interested and they want to learn more about Forge, what should they do? Let's start, let's say you're already an EasyPost customer. Should they reach out to their CSM? How, how does that work?
Brittany Williams 19:37
I'm glad you actually brought this up, because if you're an existing customer, and you want to upgrade your dashboard to the Forge dashboard, there is no lift to . . . there's no new integration needed. You'll suddenly get access to the platform, and all your data and information you've been using will carry over. So that's a good call out.
But if you do want to upgrade to the Forge product, reach out to your CSM. If you're not an existing customer yet, you can go to EasyPost.com/forge and there's a book a demo button that you can click and get access to one of our team members to demo the product for you and, and get the ball rolling.
Lori Boyer 20:15
Yeah, and I love that because like you said, everybody has kind of their own unique needs and everybody's trying to address different issues, and so that way you can get kind of a customized accounting of how you might be able to use it. So, Brittany, this is exciting! I love my EasyPost Insider episodes. Love the great work that product is doing here. Appreciate you being on today.
Brittany Williams 20:35
Thank you so much. It's been fun.
Lori Boyer 20:37
All right, we'll see y'all next time.
Brittany Williams 20:40
Bye.