Courier Integrations

We also use InXpress (I’m sure others here do too) which is booked via there own system - webship.

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We’re very keen to have this implemented, is there a rough timeline yet please?

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We don’t have an exact date on this, but we do see this as an important project, so it’s very much on the radar. I can’t guarantee anything at this stage, but I hope that we’ll get to this in Q2 this year.

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Adding in some more thoughts on this.

There would need to be some functionality to allcoate how many products would fit in our shipping boxes.

We have a small box to hold up to 9 cans and a large box to hold up to 15 cans. On shopify customers order single cans or multipacks and it would be useful for Breww to know that it can combine multiple single units or multipacks into single boxes. I.e. if someone order a 6 pack and 3 single cans, Breww would need to know that these could fit in one small box, rather than considering them as 2 separate products needing 2 separate boxes.

One thing to note though is that it was also be good to have the option on certain products to not be combined with other products. I.e. we have certain products we call gift boxes that fit into our smaller boxes with some cans and a glass. It would be good for Breww to know that this had to go in a smaller box and can’t be combined with other products in a large box for instance.

Thanks

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Thanks Jack.

I’m thinking that you can enter the weight & dimensions (height, width & depth) of all products (maybe apart from casks/kegs), plus all the dimensions and maximum weight of all possible boxes. Breww can then determine which items should go into which boxes to minimise boxes but ensure they fit and don’t go over the weight limits. This is certainly very complicated to implement on our side but could be a great solution.

How does this sound to you? Do you have other ideas on how to implement this?

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Thanks Max

I’d say that might be overcomplicating it.

Most brewers, unless I’m mistaken, will have shipping boxes for cans and shipping boxes for bottles, sometimes a few different sizes. Since the boxes normally have dividers in them, they can only fit up to a certain amount of products in them. For instance we have a square box with a divider that fits up to 9 cans. If a customer ordered 12 cans, Breww would know that it would fill up one 9 can box and have 3 in another. Obviously I’ve no idea how it works from your end so maybe my way is more complicated.

Another thing to potentially complicate things is merch. We ship merch in bags rather than our usual can boxes but so the shipping bag could be a packaging type but if some brewers are using the same boxes they ship cans in, this could be tricky for the system.

Thanks

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Hi Luke

This is currently my biggest problem in fulfillment and comes up daily. I we put our ecom through Breww but have to generate the labels inside Whistl - since moving to Shopify we have been able to streamline our label generation through their integration, however it still requires manual intervention to consolidate orders because Whistl views each Shopify SKU as a new line. This can be quite time consuming - especially when we’re running promotions on taster cases across 4 ranges. This has got better since Shopify, but using the Big Commerce was a nightmare for use. Being able to use Brew as an intermediary between webstore and our courier is the step that’s missing for us to put Breww as the central OMS to our operation.

For us, the ultimate solution required that would make Breww the central management tool for operations in our use case is the ability to use delivery addresses from integration imported orders (we have to run multiple integrations for various reasons) to generate courier shipping labels (we use multiple couriers as well depending on the order), and attach the tracking numbers to the order in the specific webstore, and mark as shipped in the webstore to trigger our email flow from inside breww.

Aside from our normal D2C ops, this could solve a massive gap in our operation when it comes to Amazon order fulfillment in our Vendor Central strategy where we are fulfilling POs of 12 x 12 can units to various RDCs via APC as better margin than palletised fulfilment at that quantity. We will occasionally partially fulfil against a PO due to lost or separated parcels which themselves incur Chargebacks from Amazon. This has proved a frustrating channel to manage as Amazon is difficult at the best of times. Having the ability to use Breww as the source of real time truth in terms of the order fulfillment across these multiple channels is the one thing I would choose to have the Breww team work on. This communication between platforms is what will enable us to stay lean as we scale.

Cheers!

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Thanks for the detailed reply, Zach, and you’re right that if Breww could be the source of truth on everything courier related, this should work really well.

The good news is that this project is currently in build. It’s hard to say with much certainty yet, as it’s quite complex, there are quite a few moving parts and we’re in the earl stages, but we’re expecting to have this complete within the next month or so. We’ll post here when we have an update :+1:

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That’s amazing that it is now underway! I had a meeting with our Whistl account manager this AM and they have offered their Tech services if you wanted to discuss anything regarding the API connections with them - feel free to reach out if you’d like me to connect you. Cheers!

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We currently use Shiptheory to book our deliveries with various couriers, not sure if one integration with Shiptheory / similar company would save Breww having to integrate with individual couriers?

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Yes, that’s the route that we’re taking :+1: as you suggest, interacting with lots of couriers individually would have taken too much time from us away from the core Breww platform.

Our chosen partner supports over 150 couriers from all around the world, but is based in the UK (like us), so there’s great support for UK-based couriers.

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Hello, just adding in some more thoughts for this integration.

It would be great to add more flexibility to the courier and general deliveries section when it comes to delivery areas and order cut off times. Hopefully the following examples will explain it better.

  • Our B2C webshop local delivery area is different to our trade one so occasionally webshop orders come through that should be classed as courier but due to our trade delivery areas, get classed as our own deliveries. It would be great to have seperation between these B2C and B2B delivery areas.

  • We also only ship B2C webshop orders on Mondays and Thursdays due to the size of our team and the volume of orders. Currently if B2C orders come through they are automatically assigned to the following days schedule as per our trade delivery rules set up in settings. Again it would be good to have separation between the B2C and B2B delivery rules so we could set that we only ship on certain days and orders would automatically come through from our B2C Ecommerce (Shopify) integration on the right day

  • Lastly on the same theme as above, if order cut off times could be an added option that would be great. Currently the option only exists to have delveries a certain amount of days after order creation whilst also using delivery area settings. If this could be improved to include cut off times that would be great. I.e. for trade orders we may use an order cut off time of 4pm the day prior to the nominated delivery day but for B2C orders it can be midnight the day before. This would also give the future option for us to offer B2C same day shipping if ordered by noon for example.

Thanks

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Hi,

Just checking is there is a target ETA for this yet?

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We’re expecting this to be ready during July, but I must admit we’re already a bit behind schedule on this due to unforeseen complications, so I cannot say for certain. We’re working on bringing this to Breww as quickly as we can :smile:

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Hi,

Just a quick message to see how far away this one is now?

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Hi Adam, I’m afraid HMRC repeatably moving the goalposts with the new duty regulations has caused havoc with our development schedule over the last month, so this had to be put on hold to ensure we didn’t miss the duty deadline. We’ve lost countless hours of work building things, only for them to change their mind again. There’s been another U-turn from them today!

I’m hopeful that we can get back to the courier integrations project next week. I’m sorry for the delay with this. We should have posted an update here to let you know about this! Thanks.

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Hi Luke,

Just wondering if there has been any further progress on this?

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Yes, there has been :smile: We’re ready to launch this as a “beta test” for anyone who would like to take part!

If you (or anyone else reading this) would like to take part in a test of the new courier integrations in Breww, please can you open a support ticket requesting access to the courier integrations beta test and let us know the names of the courier(s) that you would like to have integrated.

Assuming these are couriers in our initial beta test, we’ll then ask you for some access details (which vary by courier), run some tests on our side, and all being well, we should then be able to enable access to this part of the system on your Breww account.

We hope to run this test for a small number of weeks, and then when we’re happy that all is working as it should be, we will open access up to everyone. Please be mindful that this was a huge project, and with so many moving parts (and so many couriers involved), it’s entirely possible that we haven’t got everything right first time - which is why we’re launching it this way.

This will be an addon (pricing will be published on the website shortly), but we’ll ensure it’s discounted to free for the duration of the beta test for anyone who helps us out by taking part.

Thanks everyone for your patience with this; we’re sorry that this has taken us longer than planned, but we’re nearly there now!

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With the new courier integrations it’d be really useful if the stage of delivery was updated automatically as the shipment went through the delivery stages. e.g. Collected from us then marked as ‘Dispatched’ in Breww and delivered by the courier to ‘Completed’ in Breww.
I’m sure that’d take a lot of development work so in the meantime, it’d be great to have an option to select multiple shipments at once to be moved to a different shipment day, dispatched or completed.

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Thanks to everyone who took part in the beta test :pray: We’re delighted to announce that the test is now complete, and this feature is now available for everyone.

To get started with this feature, please see our guide:

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