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Comment by lammalamma25 | Hacker News Reader

What's your relationship with carriers? I spent a bit of time with "Large E-commerce company" We would have 3rd party sellers not delivering on time (or sometimes not delivering at all). They would claim FedEx/UPS was late or FedEx/UPS would claim it was on time but the 3rd party shipped with a different account than "Large E-commerce Company." It was a big headache for the people ensuring delivery and bad customer experience. It sounds like you want to sit as a sort of middle layer between sellers and supplies to ensure data quality. (is that correct?) If so, do you plan to integrate with carriers or how do you plan to address that.

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So part of the advantage of the approach is that we integrate with the existing system of the seller. Once they get some volume, we can calculate the following:

* Fill time: time from posting the order to the seller until they ship it as verified by their carrier integration

* Ship time: time from order being placed until ship time

* Complete time: time from order placement to notification of shipment on the consumer side

As time has gone on, we can tell who ships reliably and put those sellers in front of other buyers, etc. So eventually the data we have gives us and buyers and indication of how well vendors are adhering to SLAs around shipping times. Often the expectation is 24 hours, so it's not hard to red/yellow/green people into buckets and manage the buckets. Eventually we can offer our own SLAs for sellers we put in front of buyers but for now we're just gathering data and providing reporting.

Edit: to answer your question directly, we don't currently integrate with them. Generally speaking we can get the same data from the platform we integrate with, so it saves us from having to build N more integrations, but I agree the closer we can get to ground truth the better for vendor SLA.

Ah, sounds familiar! We didn't use carriers managed by the dropshipping supplier but rather in-house managed ones. Helped but made edge cases not covered by existing in-house solutions a real pain.

I like what I see so far from Convictional. But one thing that puzzles me with similar start-ups is the disregard for actual operations. Has nothing to do with Convictional so. But since I see that as an opportunity I put my money where my mouth is.

I agree with this. I don't think it's a software only problem, and we ran business units like this before we got into the software side. The operations side is harder (generally speaking) it's more that the enablement tech that exists isn't working for current sellers. That's partly on us to fix, and partly endemic to small sellers not having B2B sophistication. So solving the problem also requires solving the physical logistics problems and education gaps that exist. So far we're just focused on the software and to a lesser extent education. There are really good operators out there that we're trying to partner with, who tend to be weaker at the tech.

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