$200,000,000+ in New Pipeline from eCommerce Apps in 36 Months

Challenge & Goal

The eCommerce transition had led to increased requests for core logistics services along pick-up point integrations and the Company decided it needed to provide pre-built integrations to enable prospect inflows to convert into customers quicker.

After running an RFP, the Company chose an outsourcing provider to develop the integrations to ensure internal IT resources were kept focused on core development projects. The provider checked all the standard boxes and hard already been used by the Client for many years. The Integration Cost was budgeted at $60,000 plus maintenance for a total of $55,000.

Five integrations were developed and went to market. Both the internal sales team and pre-selected merchants were ready to be onboarded.

After one year of operations, the business analysis team evaluated the results to create a report for the board to decide the future strategy and found the following:

• Out of thousands of merchants that had been driven to onboard by sales & marketing, only 1.3% had actually gone through the whole onboarding experience and were shipping products.
• Merchants had hundreds of new feature requests along bug reports which were captured by the sales and help desk teams, which were not trained in eCommerce integrations.
• Merchant support went through the standard help desk, which meant a delay of days and weeks to get to the provider’s technical support.
• The provider was not specialized in eCommerce integrations and lacked trained personnel to support merchants effectively.
• The efforts to fix bugs, update features and onboard merchants resulted in a total spend of close to $1,000,000 including the use of internal resources and the provider’s billed maintenance hours.
• The sales team had gradually stopped selling the solution to merchants after 8 months. Due to missing support and lack of merchant onboarding success, the business unit was not hitting its targets.

Client Background

The Client is a Fortune500 company providing multinational package delivery and supply chain management global logistics services for decades.

Itembase Background

Itembase is a leading technology company in the digital commerce industry. Its global transaction processing Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) connects Application Providers to Brands, Merchants and Consumers on the Commerce Systems they transact on. Financial Institutions, Logistic Providers, Insurance, Accounting & Tax, Marketing and other Service and Technology Providers that provide Applications enable Brands, Merchants and Consumers through Itembase connectivity to reduce cost and increase transactions, making the commerce experience easier, more sustainable and efficient.

The Solution

The Client had to change strategy as the board decided to cut further funding for the project until a scalable model was found, which led the Company to do another RFP for an iPaaS provider.

The Result

The original budget of $115,000 was exceeded by 800% and ended up costing $1m without calculating lost revenue from poor integrations.