Video Testimonial
Ever since we started using the virtual walls, we’ve had no order mistakes.
President, Spicy Products
Spicy Products
Client since: 2022
Uses: Sellercloud, Skublox, Skustack, Waytopay.me, Shipbridge, 4D Scale
Industry: General Merchandise, Consumer Goods, Home & Garden, Healthcare
Founded: 2018
Headquarters: Downers Grove, IL
Company Size: 10 employees
Types of items sold: Hot sauce bottles, household grocery essentials, fertilizers, and lighting products.
“Ever since we started using the virtual walls, we’ve had no order mistakes.”
Caleb Vaduva, President, Spicy Products
Before Sellercloud
Spicy Products started in the retail arbitrage industry, purchasing products from Sears and flipping them for a profit on Amazon. Pretty soon, Spicy Products became a rapidly growing business and began reaching out to vendors directly.
Primarily known for its hot sauce, Spicy Products also sells various other goods across 3,000 SKUs, from groceries and healthcare to lawn and patio products, adding 50 to 100 products to their catalog daily. “Our first product we ever sold was a little tool bag,” Caleb Vaduva, President of Spicy Products, tells us.
Aside from Amazon, Spicy Products sells on the Walmart Marketplace, TikTok Shop, and Newegg.
The Challenge
Spicy Products was experiencing phenomenal growth, but with that growth came many new challenges. One of the biggest challenges is finding and implementing an e-commerce solution to properly handle incoming orders and track inventory levels.
Like many businesses, they tried using a combination of pen and paper and Excel documents. However, as you can imagine, this process was very manual and never going to work for a company with a growing number of SKUs.
On top of that, orders weren’t just increasing in number; they were becoming more complex. Spicy Products needed to fulfill various types of orders, including FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) and non-FBA orders. FBA orders needed to be prepared in advance, and non-FBA orders needed to be handed off to shipping partners. Spicy Products needed to ensure enough resources were allocated to handle all orders for any given day.
Spicy Products wanted to get their inventory in order, cut mistakes, and scale. To do this, they needed a real e-commerce solution. “We wanted to make sure that every order picked had the right quantity, didn’t have overages, didn’t have shortages,” Vaduva summarized. “We wanted to make sure that customer satisfaction was going to be at its highest when that order was delivered.”
The Solution
Spicy Products ditched their ‘pen, paper, and Excel’ workaround and decided to adopt a robust solution to keep up with the number of SKUs they were adding daily. “We knew we needed to find a solution that can help us as we’re constantly growing our catalog count,” said Vaduva. That’s when Spicy Products encountered Sellercloud and its ecosystem.
Vaduva was particularly pleased with Sellercloud’s flagship order-sorting product, Skublox. When scanning products, Skublox guides sorters to the correct sorting slot, simplifying the order sorting, dramatically reducing mistakes, and achieving 99.9% order accuracy.
Vaduva pointed out that Skublox is particularly useful for eliminating picking and sorting errors in businesses that sell multiple product variations. He explained that when you manually sort items visually, “you’re prone to making mistakes, and Skublox really helps eliminate all of those.”
However, there was one Skublox variation that Vaduva heralds as being particularly beneficial to Spicy Products—Virtual Skublox. “It was a no-brainer,” said Vaduva. Virtual Skublox works exactly like regular Skublox but without the hardware. “Right away, we wanted a system that didn’t require all the mounting hardware, didn’t require a power source to be connected to and can still be moved on the fly.”
What Spicy Products loved the most about Virtual Skublox is that it made setting up a mobile sorting station significantly easier. With the mobile wall, “we can actually sort that product directly from the bin,” said Vaduva.
Virtual Skublox made Spicy Products’ work easier and increased their order accuracy. “Ever since we’ve started using the virtual walls, we’ve had no order mistakes,” Vaduva tells us, “all of our orders and all of our picking is as accurate as it can possibly be.”
After Sellercloud
Spicy Products has been ecstatic since it brought Sellercloud and its products into its e-commerce operations. “Our workflow has definitely been a lot faster. It’s also been a lot more optimized, and it’s also prevented a lot of errors. Our orders are more accurate than they’ve ever been,” Vaduva praised.
Vaduva commended Sellercloud and its suite of products for working together to cover every e-commerce need. He told us, “picking with Skustack, sorting with Skublox, and shipping with Shipbridge has just made that whole workflow process seamless for us and couldn’t be possible without these three ecosystems.” He added, “it all blends in and works simultaneously together, and they’re all harmoniously working together.”
He went into detail about Spicy Products’ process, telling us how orders arrive in Sellercloud and a picklist is generated. A picker will then open their Skustack application, find the picklist, gather the order items from the respective bin, and place them in the correct slot of the mobile sorting station.
Spicy Products was also impressed with Sellercloud’s implementation and support teams. The “experience when we were implementing was amazing,” said Vaduva, and mentioned that any time Spicy Products faced a challenge, they could always report it and get it fixed. “We feel like it’s always a priority.”
Vaduva ends by explaining how he believes Sellercloud will play a significant role in Spicy Products’ future expansion into new marketplaces. As the number of orders increases, they won’t have to worry about how they’ll handle the influx of orders or the picking process.
