* Fill time: time from posting the order to the seller until they ship it as verified by their carrier integration

* Ship time: time from order being placed until ship time

* Complete time: time from order placement to notification of shipment on the consumer side

As time has gone on, we can tell who ships reliably and put those sellers in front of other buyers, etc. So eventually the data we have gives us and buyers and indication of how well vendors are adhering to SLAs around shipping times. Often the expectation is 24 hours, so it's not hard to red/yellow/green people into buckets and manage the buckets. Eventually we can offer our own SLAs for sellers we put in front of buyers but for now we're just gathering data and providing reporting.

Edit: to answer your question directly, we don't currently integrate with them. Generally speaking we can get the same data from the platform we integrate with, so it saves us from having to build N more integrations, but I agree the closer we can get to ground truth the better for vendor SLA.

I like what I see so far from Convictional. But one thing that puzzles me with similar start-ups is the disregard for actual operations. Has nothing to do with Convictional so. But since I see that as an opportunity I put my money where my mouth is.

Meesho is interesting. It's like an ecommerce store in a box.

We aren't a conventional marketplace ourselves and we integrate with the systems that both the sellers and buyers are using. On the network side, we make introductions to buyers and sellers in our network rather than listing products from sellers on a mass marketplace (like AliExpress). We basically vet each retailer to see which suppliers in our network would make sense for them then make introductions if there's a fit. We also tend to be focused on larger retailers and distributors rather than people who are just getting started in ecommerce.

Thanks for the feedback on the site. Will fix the hamburger menu too. Good catch.

I like your copy suggestion. It makes sense for people who might be new to dropship. The "digital destination" line came from larger retailers we talked to that wanted to expand their existing product catalog, so we aimed that at them. They tend to already do dropship today with larger suppliers, but they struggle with onboarding smaller ones. The thought of having a wider assortment of products is usually what initially piques their interest. That starts a conversation around new tools that they could use.

Our general feeling is that niche / values based aggregators are where the puck is going, as opposed to everyone being a worse version of Amazon, where people are shopping their values more often.

The other thing I would say, not to pick on any one of those offerings, is that we actually have a bunch of prebuilt seller apps to making onboarding easier. To our knowledge, that's unique, most of them just have an API and CSVs where as part of our product includes the seller side integration. Merely offering an API instead of EDI doesn't necessarily solve the problem, most of the sellers don't have ERPs or in-house IT at all so facing down JSON via API instead of X12 via EDI is equally impossible for them.

Generally we can help them with a lot more than enable drop ship, which could be underwriting their receivables, doing EDI integration, setting up a B2B program, etc.

It's less focused on marketplace sellers and more directly on the company that sources or makes it. Hope this helps.

1. Accurate product listings

2. <24 hour ship times, enforced

3. No manual steps, only automated / integrated

4. Easy returns, funded by sellers

5. Sellers based in the same country

Drop ship can range from very small and generally not very durable online retailers to massive and very sophisticated retailers. In the case of the sophisticated ones, you may not even know the difference. Amazon for example has been drop shipping a lot more, but because of their vendor SLA people can't tell it's not from FBA. It's mostly just about good vendor SLAs, local suppliers and short ship times.

The other thing we're seeing is a continuum where people start out drop shipping, and then move to wholesale when the volume grows. That way 1. Consumers get access to smaller / newer brands early and then 2. Eventually the experience gets more controlled. We do both, just generally because our customers are growing but also because you really need both to make the experience good.

For the suppliers, they're often being asked to participate in lots of different flavors of "vendor enablement" program. Most are oppressive, involve EDI integration, 40 page vendor agreements and opaque invoicing. We're trying to get rid of those things, and ideally give them a way to have one integration for all of this stuff.