DankStop began as a traditional e-commerce business - with its own warehouse and shipping, even trying 3PL's at times. Quickly gaining dominance in search results by strategically optimizing its online presence, it became clear that having a vast product selection was crucial to maintaining strong search rankings. However, managing inventory came with significant costs, in addition to the challenges of catering to ever-chaning customer preferences.
To scale its catalog without the financial burden of large inventory holdings, DankStop decided to pivot to a dropshipping model. This shift would allow them to close their warehouse and focus on expanding product offerings through dropshipping partnerships, ensuring sustained growth and agility in a competitive market.
DankStop knew that switching to a dropship model would not come without significant challenges. They'd have to connect their existing product listings and develop an automated workflow for orders, shipments and payments to avoid overwhelming suppliers. In some cases, their wholesale suppliers were artisan craftspeople, who didn't even have an online store to connect to!
On a deadline to clear their warehouse and migrate every supplier, a major pain point DankStop ran into was onboarding suppliers at a fast pace. Between store integrations, price sheets, training, and reconciling accounts receivable, drop ship suppliers were getting annoyed -- either taking forever to onboard or just ditching the partnership altogether.
DankStop was nearly forced to cut products from their catalog and find temporary storage for the products they weren't able to migrate to a dropship supplier.
DankStop team decided they needed to find a platform that covered all of the steps of the dropship life cycle: All of the initial supplier configurations, product onboarding, order sync, and automated payments.
After several SaaS products and Shopify plugins failed to meet their needs, DankStop chose the Crowdship platform for it's complete automation suite, simple supplier platform, and powerful customization options. They were able to shut their warehouse down without suffering any catalog reductions.
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DankStop's suppliers are now happy to dropship, since it doesn't cost them anything and DankStop's orders are seamlessly fulfilled alongside their own.
DankStop has since expanded their catalog to more than 25,000 SKU's, resulting in a 25% boost to average order value, while decreasing the percentage of out-of-stock listings by more than 70%. They can comfortably plan promotions in advance knowing inventory will be available, as suppliers stock high volumes of their own products.
Since they no longer need to budget cash for inventory, they've freed up working capital for marketing, content, and other revenue generating investments. They cut 80% of overhead by eliminating their building lease, warehouse payroll, and related capital expenses, far exceeding any impact to margin imposed by suppliers as a result of switching from buying wholesale to dropship.
This was all achieved in less than 60 days with no product downtime, as Crowdship was able to seamlessly integrate with DankStop's online store.
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