- Increased order volume by 30% without increasing headcount
- Used intelligent shipping to deliver 11,394 packages in a single month with 99% accuracy
- Achieved 25% of entire year’s order volume in a single month
- Processed orders 15x faster during peak season
For many ecommerce businesses, the number one challenge when it comes to fulfilment isn’t just ‘growth’, but rather unpredictable scale. It’s that moment when order volume triples overnight and the manual processes start to buckle. When this happens, there is often that “aha” moment, when you know that something needs to change. For Jane Furniss, Director of Five Senses Education – a leading supplier of educational resources to schools across Australia – that ”aha” moment came 5 years ago during Covid, when she received a phone call from an upset rural customer whose order had been sent to a post office an hour away because of a human error on a shipping label.
“At that time we had 4 people whose sole job was to create post labels – they could not keep up with the number of orders that were flooding in, and we were letting customers down. Our staffing costs were through the roof and for a few weeks we couldn’t deliver on time. It just wasn’t sustainable and we knew we needed a better system in place,” Jane explained. “That’s when we turned to ShipStation.”
Turning an operational challenge into a growth lever
What began as a humble family-run tutoring business founded by Jane’s mum 50 years ago – starting with a single store in northwest Sydney, has now grown to a thriving national business, supplying textbooks to 4,300 schools and 100,000 families across Australia.
Over the past five years, Jane has overseen a massive operational pivot, moving the business from traditional retail roots into a high-tech, high-velocity distribution model that serves thousands of institutions across Australia.
As the business grew, Jane soon discovered that their manual fulfilment processes could no longer support the order volume coming in, particularly around peak season, which for Five Senses occurs in the lead up to the new school year starting – from November right through to February. During this period, the company fulfils up to 60% of their entire year’s order volume in just a four-month window.
“We knew we were going to have to do things differently, if we wanted to grow,” Jane noted.
Before ShipStation, Jane and her team were struggling to keep up with the demand, orders were delayed as the team couldn’t get labels printed and packages out the door quick enough.
The heavy reliance on manual processes resulted in unnecessary shipping errors, costing the business time and money.
Today, those problems are a thing of the past and Jane can focus her time on growing the business. ShipStation seamlessly integrates with Five Senses selling channels, pulling orders in automatically, and with a few clicks, the team can print labels up to 20x faster, save hundreds of dollars per day by sourcing the best carrier rates and set automation rules to ensure seamless delivery, every time, ensuring they get their book packs out the door and in customers hands, faster.
Since implementing ShipStation in September 2022, Five Senses Education has doubled their order volume, without increasing headcount. In their busiest month, they shipped a staggering 11,394 book packs, with 99% order accuracy.
ShipStation’s split shipping functionality, in particular, has been a massive game changer for Five Senses. Every year, the business sets up custom back to school book and stationery packs in their system in preparation for peak season. Parents are given the link to purchase the packs before the school year starts. The products are sourced in advance, from suppliers around the world.
When they discovered late last year that a maths textbook in the packs wasn’t going to arrive in time from the publisher – and they already had 3,000 orders waiting to be shipped out – rather than panic and delay the whole order, they simply used ShipStation’s split shipping feature, which allowed them to instantly ship out the book packs without delay, and initiated an automated tracking update to the impacted customers about the late running item. When the maths textbook finally arrived, they were able to batch print 3,000 labels and get the products out within a day.
“Years ago this would have created a major challenge for us and it would have taken us several days to get all of these orders out. With ShipStation, it was so easy and quick to split the shipments, I don’t know how we operated in the past without it!” Jane said.
Automating for the future and delivering memorable customer experiences
In addition to solving the operational challenge of scaling without increasing headcount, the business has also undergone a complete website overhaul, enlisting the services of ecommerce agency webqem, to help them improve the front-end experience for their customers, making it easier for customers to browse their extensive catalogue of over 40,000 products.
Today, Five Senses continues to go from strength to strength, and they have just been awarded as a preferred provider for a NSW Department of Education tender, which would see their business added as the book supplier for an additional 2,200 schools.
With a strict 24-hour delivery KPI to meet as part of this tender, and zero room for error, Jane will be looking to further optimise their current shipping strategy, expanding on ShipStation’s core features, including:
- Optimising warehouse efficiencies by utilising features such as smarter batching and scan-to-verify to eliminate manual errors that eat up time.
- Initiate self-service returns to enhance the customer experience while keeping the back-end operations lean.
- Utilise AI intelligence and automation to make shipping smarter, including carrier selection and routing logic to provide a more seamless delivery experience.
“Our journey with Shipstation started with our online orders – now we are moving our bulk school sales and wholesale divisions to Shipstation as well. We don’t need more tech; we need to use the intelligence within the tech we already have, and with this information at our fingertips, we will be able to make better, smarter decisions for our bottom line,” Jane said.
Want to optimise your shipping operations like Five Senses did? Start your 30 day free trial of ShipStation today!
Sophia Pope Senior Director | APAC Region Lead ShipStation
Sophia Pope is the Senior Director and Site Leader for ShipStation APAC. Based in Sydney, she helps eCommerce brands scale through smarter shipping and fulfilment. With 15+ years in SaaS sales and leadership, Sophia is passionate about driving growth through automation and connected commerce.
