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On October 7th, CEO Jason Murray got a chance to speak on a panel discussion at the annual TransformX event put on my ScaleAI.

Last week I had a chance to sit down with Andrew Cox from FreightWaves TV to chat about Amazon's early days and what learnings from that period can be applied today for everyone else who isn't Amazon.

We are big fans of the community building efforts by Diane, Kristina, and the rest of the Women In Retail organization, which is why we were excited by the opportunity to support them by sponsoring their June Virtual Exchange.

Shipium is proving to be an idea that ecommerce companies want. Due to the explosion of ecommerce over the last year, it's proving to be an idea they need, too.

Ecommerce operators have a bad habit of falling into "supply-side" thinking. Forecasting demand has been figured out by someone else, they think, with merchandise ordered and ready to be placed into fulfillment centers. Their job then becomes a linear planning exercise going from start to finish in increasingly smaller units. The merchandise goes from container to truck to pallet to box to door step. This is push-based thinking. It's the idea that the job is efficiently and effectively pushing the flow of goods from beginning to end. One of the most powerful ideas both Amazon and Zulily adopted was the idea of pull-based supply chain thinking.  Start from the end goal, and work backwards. Efficient and effective planning in reverse order is where actual stepwise optimizations can be found.

In this article you’re going to learn how to structure a modern ecommerce supply chain with a focus on the customer. We wrote it in digestible chunks making it easy to see how it all connects. Textbooks are for MBA courses and five-paragraph blog posts aren’t useful. This guide will thread the needle with comprehensive yet condensed insight you won’t want to miss.

Ecommerce fulfillment is ultimately a collection of decisions being made. Some are made simultaneously while others are made sequentially. Almost all are logical decisions. If you want to improve your ecommerce fulfillment process, you need to make better decisions. But what constitutes a "better" decision?

Sometimes it seems like the behemoths of Amazon and Walmart are using black magic to promote free and fast shipping. But it's not magic. It's mostly sophisticated software combined with learned principles.

Over the last 12 months, we've had the chance to speak with hundreds of smart people working hard in the ecommerce industry (514, to be exact). We spoke to industry veterans like Arthur Valdez, Jr. Target's Chief Supply Chain Officer and jammed with founders of rising DTC brands who are thinking about fulfillment in a modern way like Woody Hambrecht of Haus. The full spectrum, each as engaging and hard working as the other. Patterns emerged that we could see with increasing clarity. I want to share these observations with you.

DTC and ecommerce companies can dramatically improve their businesses by understanding how their supply chains impact customer experiences in a way that determines winners and losers.