Walking Comfort

Walking Comfort encountered several challenges faced by new and rapidly-expanding ecommerce businesses. First and foremost, it became immediately apparent that they needed a solution to organize their inventory and orders. When they moved to a larger warehouse, they decided to find a solution that could solve those needs and help them scale in the future.

Without a solution for managing inventory or orders, Walking Comfort was highly unorganized. They weren’t receiving purchase orders (POs), didn’t have a solution for picking products based on bin locations or the ability to track movements and who received what, and relied heavily on Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA)  for order fulfillment. “We were just checking off products based on the packing lists,” said Hendricksen.

Walking Comfort struggled to consolidate its data, get a clear picture of its operational performance, and take action based on those insights. Manually exporting data and creating picklists from their sales channels could take all day. They did not have a solution to consolidate and clean data, nor a way to automate tasks based on certain reporting criteria from various sales channels.

For Data Manager Preston Johnson, Descartes Sellercloud’s reporting features help him get a complete company-wide view of Walking Comfort’s available inventory to know what they have physically, what’s reserved, and what they have in their 3PL and dropship warehouses. He also regularly uses Descartes Sellercloud’s sales reports to see a summarized and detailed view of sales per product and channel. “That’s very helpful with forecasting and analytics,” he said.

Descartes Sellercloud allowed Walking Comfort to automate many manual processes, particularly data management. Johnson tells us that he uses many scheduled tasks to export data for various purposes, including ensuring that orders are fulfilled on time. “If I were not to be using scheduled tasks, my whole day would be exporting data out of [Descartes] Sellercloud manually, as well as generating pick lists for our warehouse and store staff,” he said.

The ability to customize Descartes Sellercloud has also been tremendously helpful for Walking Comfort. “They’re fully open to customize and change what features you need,” said Hendricksen. For example, Descartes Sellercloud was more than happy to customize its reporting features to allow Walking Comfort to drill down into different aspects that were previously unavailable.

Walking Comfort was also working with a brand willing to share its inventory feeds with them. They were able to customize Descartes Sellercloud to receive information and check which products are available in their vendor’s inventory prior to ordering and mirror this inventory in their stores and marketplace channels in real-time. Then, if a customer requests a product that they don’t have available, but their vendor does, Walking Comfort can create a special order just for them.

Another significant advantage of deploying Descartes Sellercloud is that it helped Walking Comfort better manage costs and reduce them in several ways. One of the ways Descartes Sellercloud does this is by communicating with Amazon FBA to find out if any items have specific requirements for processing, such as labels and barcodes. Awareness of these requirements helps Walking Comfort comply before sending products to FBA, avoiding Amazon-imposed fees or penalties at the fulfillment centers.

A second powerful way Walking Comfort better manages its costs with Descartes Sellercloud is its container feature, which allows them to add multiple POs to a single shipping container when importing from abroad. Not only does this convenient feature save on shipping costs, but it also enables Walking Comfort to divide container costs among the products in each purchase order. They can then ensure that all the costs related to importing a product are covered and adjust pricing as needed. As Hendricksen explains, “the container feature allows us to track not just quantities, but cost basis for those products all in or identify which logistics costs were assigned to it.”

Walking Comfort also uses Descartes Sellercloud’s warehouse management, shipping, and customer support modules. “One of the biggest benefits we found with [Descartes] Sellercloud is the umbrella of modules that are provided,” said Hendricksen.

Walking Comfort began using Skustack, Descartes Sellercloud’s warehouse management system (WMS), to pick products based on bin locations and track inventory in real time to see who touched what and when, and who received orders. “It allows us to not just track our inventory but be able to drill down if there’s a discrepancy,” summarized Hendricksen.

The fact that handheld barcode scanning devices can integrate Skustack has made managing inventory on the warehouse floor immensely easier, allowing them to access the system from anywhere. “Even 20 ft up in the air when we’re picking products and we still have our inventory management program with us,” said Hendricksen. Walking Comfort also uses small Bluetooth printers to adjust incorrect barcodes on the fly—another thing Skustack enables them to do.

Because all the solutions they use are part of Descartes Sellercloud’s ecosystem, if Walking Comfort ever needs assistance with shipping, inventory, or orders, it’s only one phone number to call for support, making it far easier to fix.

With the help of Descartes Sellercloud, Walking Comfort evolved into a highly-efficient and thriving ecommerce business, enabling them to make the most of their warehouse and realize their ecommerce potential. “[Descartes] Sellercloud allowed us to save time and gain efficiency,” said Hendricksen. They would not have been able to operate in their large warehouse without Descartes Sellercloud and Skustack.

Both Descartes Sellercloud and the Skustack WMS helped save Walking Comfort hours of work. Descartes Sellercloud’s automations and scheduled tasks helped cut down manual tasks. “You can spend hundreds of hours compiling and collecting data. [Descartes] Sellercloud makes it easy to do so in an hour or two. [It] saves hundreds of man hours a week,” said Johnson. Meanwhile, Skustack eliminated picking errors. “Before Skustack, staff would pick the wrong size or variation. That doesn’t happen anymore,” says Hendricksen. That’s not to forget Shipbridge, which helped cut shipping costs by more than 55% and even enabled stores to dropship directly from retail locations.

Increased efficiency helped Walking Comfort take its growth to the next level. Using Descartes Sellercloud’s many marketplace integrations, they easily expanded to many new channels. They grew so rapidly that they doubled the size of their inventory space by renting the warehouse next door, too. “That growth would not have been possible without a good inventory management program,” said Hendricksen.

Throughout their journey with Descartes Sellercloud, Walking Comfort always felt supported. “Our experience with the [Descartes] Sellercloud support has been overall really good,” said Hendricksen. Johnson added that he feels that the support team advocates for them a lot and ensures any issues they have are well-communicated to the rest of the Descartes Sellercloud team.

Looking to the future, Walking Comfort aims to grow further and expand to more marketplaces with Descartes Sellercloud. “We do believe that [Descartes] Sellercloud can help us grow,” said Hendricksen, explaining that they know continued growth is possible because they have gotten this far already.

Hendricksen is also optimistic about Sellercloud’s partnership with Descartes and the potential growth that could follow. “I think there’s going to be a lot more benefit to the customer, and ultimately it will help customers grow,” he said.