ShippingEasy innovates fast to improve logistics for small online retailers

For small, independent online shops, the world of e-commerce is wide and navigating it can be complex. At any given time, orders might come in from Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Shopify, PayPal, WooCommerce, and even Walmart, as traditional brick-and-mortar retailers get in on the game.

Gregg Sporar is a product operations analyst at ShippingEasy. The company’s software allows e-commerce merchants to manage their multichannel shipping and fulfillment with the best available shipping rates and time-saving automation to help grow their businesses.

The product team’s job is to understand ShippingEasy’s diverse set of users, then build and improve features that meet those users’ needs as efficiently as possible. Thanks to their work, and use of Pendo, the team is innovating faster than ever, cutting feature improvement time down from months to just days.

In the past, it’s been difficult for the product team to identify the most active users of features under consideration for upgrades or replacement. Now, when Sporar wants to know exactly which users have used a feature within a specified date range, he can simply pull a list and target in-app surveys at the most relevant users to ask what they think about it. Having this information saves the team at least two hours that would have been spent manually digging through their systems and reaching out via email.

This method proved crucial when it came time to upgrade the platform’s “Split Quantities” feature, which lets users split large orders into smaller ones. The feature worked great on orders that had just one item, but it did not support orders with multiple items, Sporar says.

After identifying frequent users of the feature in Pendo and doing some research and outreach, the team overhauled the feature and attached an in-app poll to gauge user satisfaction with the changes. The poll saw a 55% response rate—far higher than anything ShippingEasy had ever seen from email.

About two-thirds rated it either 4 or 5 out of 5, and those who responded with a 1, 2, or 3 were presented with a field to provide feedback on what they didn’t like. After receiving those notes, ShippingEasy used a second poll featuring an animation of a prototype fix for one of the problems mentioned, asking whether or not it would be a good approach. The second poll saw an 83% response rate, Sporar says, and 71% of the respondents approved of the proposed enhancement. That gave the team the confidence they needed to move forward with development.

“[What Pendo allowed us to do] that we could never do before was get feedback rapidly but very inexpensively, because it’s just a guide. You put it up, you put it out there, and immediately you’re going to be able to see responses,” Sporar says. “It allowed us to focus, on the product side, on ‘Did we really get this feature right?’”

Before Pendo, that process could have taken months, if the problem was ever realized at all. For the “Split Quantities” project, the product team had actionable information at their fingertips in just three days. “We just took that entire cycle of product feedback on a new feature and just collapsed it down from months, literally into days,” he says.

And while “Split Quantities” is only used by a subset of ShippingEasy’s customers, those customers rely on it as a key part of their workflow. With all the enhancements in place, median usage of the feature by those customers has doubled.

“We’ve cut out all that friction,” he says. “[Pendo] is always talking about product love, right? And that’s where we’re trying to go here at ShippingEasy. We’re trying to get a better product for our customers and that’s what Pendo helps us do.”