Smoke Cartel, a leading retailer in smoking and vaping essentials, recognized the need to expand their product assortment to better serve their customers and stay ahead in a competitive market. However, their existing drop shipping infrastructure was built in-house, proving to be expensive, complex to maintain, and distracting them from focusing on their core business.
Their goal was to continually add new SKUs to their site while seamlessly transitioning their suppliers to a single, efficient platform. This strategic priority led Smoke Cartel to choose Crowdship as their preferred solution.
By partnering with Crowdship, they could streamline their operations, simplify supplier management, and focus on growth without the overhead and complications of maintaining their own dropshipping infrastructure.
The Smoke Cartel team was no stranger to the challenges of scaling a dropship business. One of the largest hurdles retailers run into when they seek to expand is suppliers using a variety of platforms. Solutions to connect them take months of back and forth between IT teams to configure, while their finance teams got frustrated trying to reconcile dropship orders and accounts receivable.
The Result? Suppliers get frustrated. They either take months to finish onboarding, or decide drop shipping is too complicated and not worth the effort. This pattern made it difficult for Smoke Cartel to continue expanding their catalog at such an aggressive pace, while the problems with maintaining in house tech kept piling up.
The Smoke Cartel team decided to analyze how much they would spend maintaining their own platform, vs how they could transform their business by bringing vendors onto a centralized platform that made it easy to dropship.
They ultimately chose Crowdship, for it’s simple migration tools, supplier onboarding flow, and ease of integrations. The teams were finally able to focus on strategy and merchandising, and less about IT and finance problems.
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Smoke Cartel can now focus on finding the latest products for their customers, and establishing merchandising partnerships with top selling brands. They know they have a scalable, reliable infrastructure ready to handle any amount of products, sales, or suppliers
Smoke Cartel can now confidently initiate discussions with potential suppliers knowing that they will always be able to integrate with their systems and get them onto Smoke Cartels site quickly.
The new record for onboarding a supplier is 2 days from agreement to first sale, a massive improvement from 3 months, or an 92% reduction in onboarding time. Furthermore, they’re no longer solely reliant on an antiquated and unsupported framework for adding new brands, a strategy that had previously led to Smoke cartel waiting months to onboard frustrated new suppliers.
These outcomes were notably achieved without modifying or replacing existing eCommerce systems, as Crowdship was able to seamlessly integrate with Smoke Cartels Shopify store.
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