ShipperHQ — Acquisition | Growth Case Study

Elevator Pitch
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According to a 2014 survey of online shoppers, 28% of respondents said they would abandon shopping carts if presented with unexpected shipping costs, making it critical for online businesses to provide customers with transparent, accurate pricing for their orders.

  1. 91% of shoppers try to reach a free shipping threshold
  2. 45% of customers abandon their cart because of unsatisfactory delivery options
  3. 82% of customers prefer to shop from a retailer that shows actual delivery dates

ShipperHQ allows Merchants to offer shipping convenience and transparency to their customers — and increase sales.

ShipperHQ is the Amazon-style checkout experience that converts.

With increased visibility into shipment data from checkout, you can see how ShipperHQ packed each order to get rates and save time and money replicating this at fulfillment.

ShipperHQ integrates with your preferred shipping carrier and your E-commerce platform like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, etc.

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
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Who is not a customer?

  1. >90% of the drop shippers. (On Shopify, >80% stores are drop shippers)
  2. Businesses whose shipping costs don’t increase with quantity in the Order items.
  3. Merchants with their own Custom E-commerce platform exist but are very few — not considered in this assignment.
  4. Merchants from Developing nations — The product is targeted towards mature markets with good connectivity and paying customers.

Who is a customer?

Total Addressable Market (TAM)
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E-commerce Platforms: BigCommerce + Shopify (incl. Plus)+ Magento + SFCC + WooCommerce

BigCommerce: 50k
Shopify: 1.6M
Magento: 161k
WooCommerce: 3.1M

Total = ~5M E-commerce sites.
Assuming 70% of them are basic dropshipping stores and don’t require ShipperHQ — it leaves us with 1.5M e-commerce stores.
Out of these 1.5M stores, I’m assuming ~500k active e-commerce stores(WIP: data behind this)
Retail (B2C): 475k stores (accounting for 95% of the market)
Enterprise (B2B + B2C): 25k stores (accounting to 5% of the market)

Acquisition Strategy
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  1. Partnerships
    a) Agency Partnerships
    Incentives: Revenue-sharing, co-branding and 1:1 Dedicated Support
    b) Logistics Partnerships
    Carrier companies come to ShipperHQ to ask them to integrate APIs for live rates.
    Incentives for Carrier: Enables channel for Logistics company to take new merchants onboard who face the problem statements of ICP.
    Incentives for ShipperHQ: One-time revenue OR, Enough number of Merchants requesting for carrier’s integration
  2. Referrals
    Merchants refer other merchants for an x% recurring revenue share.
    Or a one-time revenue share (I like Airbnb’s copy for fixed referral reward)
  3. Organic (Marketplaces for Apps/Plugins)
    Shopify Apps Store
    BigCommerce App Marketplace
    SFCC App Marketplace
    Magento App Marketplace
    SEO for above Marketplace and Google.
    a) Target autocompletes “How to ….”
    b) Programmatic SEO.
  4. Paid Ads
    a) Community participation — Sponsor talks from E-commerce experts, giveaways etc.
    b) Marketplace Ads
  5. Content Loops
    a) Video content: DIY How-Tos on Youtube
    b) Actively involved with Agency partners
    Monthly calls — Discussing new updates, insights, prioritizing partner feature requests etc. — Building belonging.
    c) Private community channels for Partners

Thanks for reading this! I will share a ShipperHQ’s Onboarding Study very soon :)

🙏 Feedback: I’m trying to get out of my comfort zone and learn Product Growth. If you have any feedback, please do let me know at sam+shqacq [at] sameerkumar.website

🔌 Shameless Plug: I’m the maker of ShipBlink. A product in a similar category.