At Rocketspark we get genuine enjoyment from seeing businesses launch and grow. A common theme amongst clients as they grow is how to scale well and minimise their operational admin time and run more efficiently. We see this efficiency theme particularly amongst our ecommerce clients.
The story begins - a few sales online
Many start out with a small range and selling a few products online to complement their offline activities. If they’ve got great products and spread the word well with SEO, social media and email marketing, they tend to grow well—but the sheer volume of admin work of packing, invoicing and shipping orders can become quite a hurdle.
One business that I’ve been particularly delighted to see grow well is Needle and Nail by Jeremy and Dee Rolston. Jeremy and Dee are friends from my teens and Jeremy played the guitar and sang at my wedding. They started making beautiful wooden toys and dolls in 2014. They initially sold on Etsy which is an online marketplace for special handmade products. My brother and fellow co-founder also named Jeremy had been onto Jeremy and Dee for a while about selling their products online. It took a bit of gentle convincing and even a little mates rates discount (I don’t think we paid ‘em anything for the wedding!) and they started selling online with a Rocketspark ecommerce website.
Ecommerce success brings a new set of challenges
Since they launched their website with e-commerce Jeremy and Dee haven’t looked back and now their online sales on their Rocketspark website is 90% higher than Etsy over the last 12 months and their business is more than doubling year on year. Etsy still works well for their business especially for building awareness through reaching a wider audience but the small investment in creating their own e-commerce website has certainly paid off.
As the Needle and Nail products are all handcrafted by Jeremy and Dee, their time available for making their lovely wooden toys and dolls is really precious—it equals their manufacturing capacity. Actually getting the goods to customers is equally important but chews up a lot of time. Jeremy and Dee were on the lookout for ways to make things simpler and would contact us from time to time about features that would streamline their business operations.
GoSweetSpot to streamline the shipping process
One service they spotted to help them with their operations was GoSweetSpot. GoSweetSpot is a free platform built to streamline the shipping process and easily select the most attractive shipping rates for services from both domestic & international supplier partners. Jeremy and Dee signed up for GoSweetSpot and would type in the delivery address, parcel dimensions and weight and GoSweetSpot would recommend the best freight option and print the courier label. Jeremy said he loved the fact that he could choose the best rate and didn’t need to pre-purchase courier tickets.
While GoSweetSpot offered a nice gain in convenience and time there was still the manual task of copying the order details into GoSweetSpot which was an area that was too easy to make a simple mistake and ship their toys to the wrong place which doesn’t go down well with customers who’ve carefully selected a handmade item which is likely to be a gift to be given on a certain date.
Rocketspark now connects with GoSweetSpot
With business continuing to grow Jeremy was wondering, if he was busy now, what would the Christmas rush look like—so he gave us a nudge to provide him with a seamless integration between his Rocketspark online shop and GoSweetSpot. Jeremy wasn’t the only one to get in touch about this feature and we’d kept a track of all the client requests and we realised this integration was something we needed to do.
So in time for the upcoming Christmas peak we’ve launched a direct integration between Rocketspark Online Stores and GoSweetSpot. This integration eliminates the manual data entry into GoSweetSpot from Rocketspark orders.
*GoSweetSpot is only available in New Zealand.
Streamlined shipping to save time & money with GoSweetSpot and Rocketspark
So how does GoSweetSpot work with Rocketspark?
Here’s how Jeremy and Dee are using GoSweetSpot with Rocketspark on Needle and Nail:
- The customer orders one of Needle and Nail’s beautiful handmade toys
- Rocketspark sends the order details to GoSweetSpot automatically
- Jeremy and Dee then go to GoSweetSpot and choose the best rate for shipping their products. They’ve set up preset shipping dimensions and weights for their main parcel sizes or they can add a bespoke parcel as a one off type.
- Jeremy then books the courier pickup through GoSweetSpot and prints the courier ticket which has the address label
- When the item is collected by the courier, GoSweetSpot tells Rocketspark the order has been shipped, so the order history is updated and the customer is sent their courier tracking information
- GoSweetSpot invoice Jeremy and Dee for all their shipments for payment on the 20th of the following month
- Jeremy and Dee sit back in their rocking chair (that Jeremy has made) during his new-found spare time and watch their kids pack the orders, now that it’s a beautifully simple and sweet process.
Currently GoSweetSpot is available in New Zealand only.
To learn more see our guide about connecting GoSweetSpot with Rocketspark.
