How iRestore Scaled 5x in Order Volume With Only 2 New Hires

We saw like 40% accuracy improvements in the past two years since I started. We're doing five times the volume already. Our team has only grown in the warehouse by two people. I was brought in by the ops director a few years back when they realized the company had been very manual, spreadsheet-based in its operation and they were going to need to pivot for efficiency gains. Maintaining an operation on spreadsheets, especially at the time at a $50 million revenue, now a hundred million revenue company, was just crazy talk. It was a miracle that lasted as long as it did with such minimal technology. So I was brought on specifically because I had experience in onboarding ERPs in the past and working with onboarding teams. I worked with a Manhattan SCALE implementation. Worked with a JD Edwards E1 implementation. So I was kind of brought in to help bridge that gap, figure out what the company actually needed. No one in the company had really had experience with either WMS or ERP. So it was really figuring out what did the company need, what were the gaps, where did they need to be filled, and what was the right tool. Did we really need an ERP? Was it ERP and WMS? Was it just a WMS? What did we need? With my background at a company that was using SCALE and JD Edwards and RF-SMART and all this middleware, I knew that was not something I wanted to replicate. I knew all the complexity, the timeline, and being a fairly lean company, we weren't going to have all these support people in place to support multiple programs bolted together and troubleshooting anytime something went down. So the priority was looking around, and Fulfil came up early on in that search and checked all those boxes. We kind of honed in on that, comparing you guys with a NetSuite implementation or an Acumatica with that multi-piece approach. I think it's definitely borne out in the evidence that the support we've gotten from you guys as we've needed to scale and grow and pivot and how quick it is to add a channel and move things around. Now me by myself, I'm able to make batch templates and add automation rules and add a new channel without having to loop in four different support teams and open tickets all over the place, put in a change ticket and change notice and take 6 months to get all this stuff to work (like I would have had to do using previous systems). We had no inventory system to start. No way to tell where things were other than a clipboard and a spreadsheet and going out into the warehouse and saying, "Well, this thing's on that shelf place." So having bin-level inventory was a necessity. It was a must for our WMS. That was a huge transition and shift, fulfilling everything ourselves from our warehouse with Fulfil, which then enabled directed picking and pick flow. We went from just having ShipStation before, printing batches of orders and someone manually going in there trying to put a light pick together and hand a batch to somebody. Now we've got an automated pick process that directs through locations. We're batching orders by channels, by products to get the most efficient pick. We're cartonizing before the order is ever picked, so the box is being chosen, meaning the packers aren't guessing. Night and day really across the board. It was what we knew we didn't have and what we needed. Right off the bat, we saw from an accuracy standpoint on pick accuracy, because it was hard to have metrics beforehand, but some of the things that we were tracking beforehand were getting a certain amount of orders come back or complaints due to wrong item, double item, or missing item. Errors in the pick flow have almost been completely eliminated. Then speed. Our volume has grown, we've been lucky that we're a very, very fast-growing company. That SLA, the time from when the order comes in to when we are getting that order picked, we have that 4-hour hold in Shopify. When an order comes in, most of the time we're bypassing it, we're pulling that hold off. Whereas before, we were printing orders, we'd had to preprint orders to get the tracking number out there, but we weren't actually picking that order till 3 days later. Not even being able to tell CS which of those orders is in this stack sitting on a desk somewhere waiting to be picked, and it says it's shipped but hasn't actually shipped yet. The accuracy, the efficiency, the numbers are absolutely insane. We would have absolutely failed had we just stayed with what we were doing, or the team would have grown with the volume and we would have been less efficient. From an accounting standpoint and inventory level standpoint, having bin-level inventory and cycle counts and running an active cycle count versus before we were doing a monthly manual full inventory. Ton of time being saved there. Now on a monthly close, inventory is within 1 to 2% whereas before it was off by 10% variance every month. Previously, we had no way to process the EDI files other than just manually doing an export, importing a CSV into ShipStation, generating all these labels, exporting the tracking info, and then reimporting that back up into Rithum or CommerceHub into Costco systems because we had no way to process EDI docs. Now with Fulfil, the EDI docs are all getting processed. It's all automated. Turns into a sales order. A sales order turns into a customer shipment. We had an ops associate whose job was, part of every morning, that Costco task and then multiple times throughout the day. That employee probably spent 10 hours a week on just manually moving files around from one system to another and ensuring every tracking number got manually updated, pasted in where it needed to be, and following all the way through between ShipStation back to CommerceHub or Rithum. We list a specific bundle that's a Costco-only bundle on their website. So having a kit on the fly, that order comes in as an EDI. We map it to the two items, it comes in as one line, we map it to the two lines that are actually in that bundle. That gets blown out. Everything gets taken care of. The pick, the mapping of the carrier. Beautiful. Night and day difference between what we were doing before and what we're doing now. Just completely automated batching templates to keep them separate. Automation rules to apply the right carriers. We weren't having to manually make sure we were getting those right carriers. Because they come in, we have to use Costco's drop ship account, we have to use their UPS account. We've got to map it to the exact code that came in. That's all automated now. Built on the fly kits has been huge for us. We do have a lot of built on the fly kits in our Shopify store. They do kind of change a lot. Yesterday, we had the sales team come up with, "Hey, we've got this event in New York this weekend. We need a bunch of new kits that we're going to want to run on the POS. Can we add these in?" Sure. It's just a matter of we've already got the SKUs in there. Map it to the listing in Shopify. Done deal. Takes me no time. Those are going to be automated. These just came in from the sales team on a Thursday for an event on a Friday, and it's done. Our growth plans and goals, everything is around retail, trying to expand our retail presence. Costco has been a great partner and customer of ours. That channel has only been growing year over year. We really want to get in store. That would be huge for us. We've added, since we've onboarded with Fulfil, Best Buy, Salon Centric, Goodee, Consignment to our wholesale that wasn't there at all before. We added a Shopify wholesale store. We've expanded quite a bit channel-wise. The ability to add those, to map those, to get those on and to support the sales team has been very easy, very turnkey. Everything's there. The process is very repeatable. It's made it very easy to then turn around and not be a roadblock to the sales team or to the expansion plans. That money-back guarantee, as you might imagine, is big. It's bold. And it has historically led to us having a pretty high return rate. Our return rate is historically about 10%. So the more we grow and scale, the more volume we're shipping, obviously return volume stays the same ratio, it means tons of more returns. That has gone up tremendously just in the past year or two. It was a very manual process. We bring these things in. They might be brand new or they might be like new. We do have a refurb process where we're going to clean those, put them back in inventory in a refurb version SKU, and list those on and sell them through an eBay channel. That used to be a very manual process. Things come in, things are getting changed. Everything's in spreadsheets. We're trying to track how many of these things came in, how many are waiting to be cleaned, how many have been cleaned, how many have then been turned into a refurb, how many got thrown away, how many we're going to send back to China to the manufacturer for QC purposes. All these different processes, steps, and stages were all being controlled manually with a very large volume of units. That's all completely tracked now. The return gets initiated in Shopify, that's coming in, and we're tracking it before it ever comes in the door. We know what's about to come in. We can process it against the actual shipment, the device that was shipped out. All of our devices are serialized. We're tracking that on the way out. Being able to know which order and expecting a return that's coming from helps track back to which serial number is being expected to come back. Being able to turn that into another SKU, change the value of that product, that inventory now being tracked. Not having to manually keep track of new versus refurb because we've got the system, it's all automated. eBay picks up, it's got its mapping to its products. That money-back guarantee heavily impacts ops, but Fulfil has really helped what was a very manual process. It's got to be at least 50% faster. We probably eliminated three spreadsheets right off the bat. We eliminated a whole lookup step and a reach-out step where one team member had to reach out to another team member. A whole communication, stop and wait process. We're doing twice, three times as many returns as we were doing a year ago and we've still got the same two employees doing them. Having our merchant success manager has been great. Having someone to check in with or someone that's checking in on how the multiple steps and processes are going has been really helpful. Then definitely that first post-launch, I think it was at the six-month mark visit, where the team came and did a visit. That really helped because it kickstarted both some of the changes with automation rules, batching templates, and cartonization changes that really unlocked a lot more efficiencies that we didn't have going in the first six months with Fulfil. The support's been great. The merchant success manager, the on-site visit was really great. Really looking forward to another one in the future because having the team come and see it and touch it and feel it and walk through it, even if they can look and see our configurations and look and see all of our rules and how everything's kind of set up. We're working with you guys. I'm not working with a third-party implementation contractor who's maybe officially licensed or maybe not to implement that software package and then signing support contracts with multiple third parties. Maybe if I needed a WMS and an ERP, I'd have to contact multiple teams. So it's been really nice having it all through you guys, from the beginning, from sales to implementation and then post-launch support, all under one roof, all the same faces throughout the whole process. That has been different than what I experienced in the past. Instead of one team passing the baton to the next team, it's been nice to just keep that baton passing all on the same roof. I think that's been a key difference maker. The coolest thing you guys have going right now, the MCP and Claude connections, the LLM connections, letting us build micro apps and kind of letting us build on and read and write data directly from our instances, has been pretty awesome. Being able to just go in and change and add functionality to the system on the fly. This whole LLM micro app thing has been really cool and very enabling.