Marks: Low-volume e-commerce customers are often the hardest to support
James Marks · Why Whiplash Exited With $1.3m Raised, 16% Margin Profile in Order Fullfillment SPace · Jul 3, 2020 · at 8:32
Whiplash founder James Marks explains why serving low-volume merchants generates heavy support overhead compared to high-volume brands.
0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There's an inversion where the less volume you have, the harder customer you are. There, there's something about I don't want to get too diminutive about it, but there's something where small customers are sometimes small for a reason. And it's because they're, maybe they're not e-commerce pros, maybe they're better at something else. And so they tend to have more support, more, more handholding to the process and just becomes literally expensive for us to support it.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from James Marks
Whiplash counted subsidized carrier pass-through costs as top-line revenue
“And so we did want it to flow through our accounts and we did consider it revenue, even at times when we were subsidizing it.”
Whiplash operated on a lean 16 percent gross margin
“I mean, really, you know, we can get it down to about a 16% gross margin, and then we're paying salaries out of that.”
The 'billion-dollar-or-bust' VC path is unfair to startup employees
“You know, we want to be able to grow at, you know, two or three X per year and have that and have investors that want to be a part of that and not put us on this, you know, billion dollar valuation or bust path. It's important for us to have the company secure…”
Port Logistics Group acquired Whiplash in April 2020
“In April we were acquired by Port Logistics Group.”