Temando – a shipping platform for carriers and retailers

Recently I had a briefing from Carl Hartmann, CEO and co-founder of Temando, a company I had not heard of before and was interested to know more about after my blogs around Christmas 2015 regarding supply chain issues.

Temando are an Australian company originally based in Brisbane but with support now out of San Francisco and with sales offices in London, Paris and Sydney. Back in 2009, the founders recognised a gap in the marketplace for a platform to link C2C business. The first version of the platform was launched in 2011 and according to the company’s record had 14,255 Users with 182 million transactions by the end of that year. Between 2012 and 2014, the company rolled out a series of API’s to various applications starting with Magneto (for more details see Magneto). By the end of this period they had grown to 52,000+ Users with 2.1 billion transactions. In 2015, Temando raised a Series B Investment from Neopost Shipping (for more details see Neopost ).

So what is this platform offered by Temando? As a retailer, it provides you with access to any B2B or B2C carrier services and then lets you compare and select the most appropriate carrier service to meet your needs. In addition, the platform provides the means to create manifests for the carrier with bulk processing for Small to Enterprise businesses. It is a hybrid rates system where the user can choose managed, facilitated or a special combination of carrier rates. This is important as it allows the retailer to work directly with their chosen carrier partners. Another feature is the ability to print carrier compliant labels for your parcels as well as creating picking slips for the warehouse team to locate the goods. In terms of analytics, the platform can provide detailed reports which can be used to highlight areas for process improvement as well as providing comparison of performance of carriers used. What is really good is that the platform supports both the big international carriers as well as the small local ones on the same platform at the same time.

So that handles what it does for the shipment side, but what about from a customer perspective? Shipping is a leading cause of shopping cart abandonment (for more details see here). The Temando platform helps retailers overcome this by providing customers with the price of shipping before they checkout as delivery choice, such as 3hr, same-day, overnight, locker collection or click n’ collect. Support for returns is also offered. The platform also supports the ability to create ‘Shipping Promotions’ where the retailer can control Free Shipping based on basket size, SKU type and even the time of day.

Figure 1: Termando Product (Source: Temando)

With this sort of product it is important to understand who their e-commerce partners are. Temando have an impressive set that includes eBay, Magneto, IBM, Oracle, Demandware and NetSuite. Like many small software companies, they have followed the Microsoft route of using solution partners to help customers develop interfaces to specialised systems. They also have partnerships with some of the major SCM vendors including IBM Sterling and Manhattan Associates. In what Temando term “Industry Partners” there are American Express, Google and PayPal.

So much for the background on who Temando are, the main part of Hartmann’s briefing was concerned with a report that the company had commissioned on the State of Shipping in Commerce in 2016. Figure 2 shows the results of the survey for the UK market in terms of the wants of consumers, what retailers are offering and what consumers are prepared to pay for a premium. It is interesting to note that what retailers are offering doesn’t always tie in with what consumers are prepared to pay a premium for.

Figure 2: What UK Consumers Want (Source: Termando)

This disparity between what is being offered and what is wanted is further highlighted in the results shown in Figure 2.

Figure 3: What Consumers Want (Source: Termando)

It should be remembered that Temando is not a courier, an aggregator or an eCommerce Platform. Their shipping software connects with existing business systems to provide shipping experiences in the shopping cart and multi-carrier fulfillment in any backend system. Temando’s experience in the eCommerce and Shipping Industry is very deep, built up through their shared experience with their customers. The platform seems to be able to work for all sizes of retailers and shippers. Bloor sees this product and company as worth taking a look at.