May 31, 2013
Shipwire has been announced as the winner of the 2013 SIIA CODiE awards for the Best Supply Chain Company. This award is a very humbling recognition of our work from our peers in the software industry, and we accept it with great pride.
At Shipwire, we are obsessed with making our application simpler and our platform more flexible. My experience leading Shipwire’s engineering team has continually reinforced for me that while simplicity brings you users, flexibility is what keeps them and allows them to grow with you (and it is as true of code as it is of product). These are not enough, though.
E-commerce is evolving quickly, and the rate of change of that evolution is increasing. Damon has previously spoken about how inspired we are by the entrepreneurship of our customers; their creativity and drive. Every day we are wowed, not only by the products our customers are developing, but the novel ways in which they are reaching their markets; the different pieces they are connecting. We take pride in trying to match their pace, releasing improvements to our software almost daily.
This SIIA CODiE award is a big deal. While we are fortunate to have kind quotes from some of our customers on our web site and walls, there is a special pride in being recognized by your peers; peers who are similarly obsessed with keeping up with their customers.
E-commerce evolution is accelerating because technology tools are drastically reducing long-standing frictions; everything is getting faster. Terms like “real-time” and “on-demand” get thrown around a lot in the technology world, but in truth, every part of our industry is trending toward instancy.
Your next smartphone already knows you want it, and it is waiting for you nearby. Just as content delivery networks have made web browsing faster over the past decade, now products can be pushed closer to buyers, and without fear of overstock or shortage. Predictive analytical tools are good enough to make efficient “inventory delivery networks” a reality.
If you are an up and coming product brand, your next big sales partner may have already pre-sold the second generation of your hyper-funded Kickstarter project. The same protocols that make it easy to connect LinkedIn to your Twitter account are going to make it easy to offer your goods to a global audience of interested buyers with one and a half clicks. Think “Share” buttons for next season’s SKUs.
We’re humbled to have won the Supply “Chain” CODiE, for the best supply chain company, but at the same time we know that rapid e-commerce evolution means that logistics is becoming less linear every day. In other words, the distance between intention and delivery is becoming negligible and maybe even negative. It is only a matter of time before your customers get a tracking number before they click the buy button. At Shipwire, we are tremendously excited to be helping e-commerce get there.