How SAP Business One and ShipStation Improved Fulfillment for BILLY Footwear

BILLY Footwear was founded by Billy Price and Darin Donaldson in 2015 to create functional shoes based on the concept of Universal Design. After an accident in his teens that broke his neck, Billy Price wanted to create a company that would not only help him overcome his personal challenge of putting his shoes on and taking them off, but one that could increase the quality of life for many others. BILLY shoes have unobstructed entry—meaning one can simply set one’s foot onto the shoebed and then zip around the upper to secure it instead of tying the laces. This unobstructed entry makes the shoes accessible for people with mobility challenges and more convenient for everyone.

Problem: 

BILLY Footwear is sold through multiple channels, including big-box retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s, marketplaces like Amazon and Zappos, as well as their own ecommerce store and smaller retail dealers. Delivering products through all of these retail channels was a challenge that prompted the team to look into a more robust fulfillment solution. From 2018 to 2019, BILLY Footwear saw a 260% increase in sales growth. Managing their inventory was becoming a bigger challenge as the company grew because both retail partners and direct customers were all pulling from the same inventory count. To support and manage its growth, the BILLY Footwear team needed a technology stack with scalable solutions to better streamline their accounting, inventory management, and shipping processes

 “It wasn’t a matter of like ‘we need to move our business to ShipStation.’ It was a matter of focusing on one problem. And then, as we started focusing and addressing that one problem, all of these other problems that we’ve found are getting resolved as well.” 

Billy Price, Co-Founder of BILLY Footwear

Solution: 

Billy says his team chose SAP Business One as their ERP (business management) platform to meet three main requirements: inventory management, accounting, and a better 3PL solution. Previous 3PLs were mismanaging orders from big retailers. Billy says: “Through the integration of this ERP system, we got connected with a better vendor…everything funnels into this central hub”. Through the integration of SAP Business One and a new 3PL, BILLY Footwear now spends less time navigating B2B orders and inventory inconsistencies. 

“When we were going through the onboarding process [of SAP Business One], we realized that we could export to ShipStation. That was a benefit I didn’t realize was going to exist. There’s much better reporting… you can earmark inventory for certain vendors.”

Billy Price, Co-Founder of BILLY Footwear

In order to create a unified view of their business with an ERP as their central hub, Billy sought help from OptiProERP. OptiProERP is a complete business management (ERP) solution for retail/ecommerce, distribution, and manufacturing on SAP Business One. It helps small and midsize companies better manage, automate, and scale their backend processes from order to fulfillment and improve their omnichannel customer experience with a single world-class system and data asset.

OptiProERP leveraged Alluvia’s integration between ShipStation and SAP Business One to seamlessly connect ShipStation, ecommerce solutions, and EDI integrations. This gave BILLY Footwear the ability to streamline and automate processes from order to fulfillment more easily and efficiently with less manual work.

“BILLY Footwear needed a foundational technology stack to support the growth of its amazing brand and products. SAP Business One, ShipStation, and Shopify were the core pieces of this stack. OptiProERP helped tie these solutions together to allow BILLY Footwear to orchestrate and automate its business processes, end-to-end, from one central hub. Now BILLY Footwear is able to do more and manage more with less, and provide an even better customer experience.”

Sahib Dudani, CEO, OptiProERP

ShipStation was the ingredient that really made the scaling of BILLY Footwear’s B2C business manageable. The integration of OptiProERP with SAP Business One, ShipStation and Shopify allows Billy’s team to view everything they need in one spot. This has given relief to his fulfillment team: “By having it the way it’s set up right now, it allows our fulfillment team to not really think. Because every order they’re fulfilling, they’re fulfilling it the exact same way—even if it’s business to business or business to customer.” BILLY Footwear manages all of its fulfillment through ShipStation.

“There are so many components to ShipStation that just add so much value—the scan to verify because all of our shoes have a barcode. They all have that UPC code. But man, you start looking at shoeboxes over and over and over. If you’re just looking at the name and the sizes and a piece of paper, I mean, you just go cross-eyed. Stuff starts to blend together. So being able to use scan to verify to ensure that you have the right widget going into the correct box. Then to be able to have it print out to a label printer—it’s just made everything really, really efficient.”

Billy Price, Co-Founder of BILLY Footwear

Results  

ShipStation has allowed the BILLY Footwear team to process more orders each day, while improving customer satisfaction. Scan to verify ensures that the right products are in the right box and shipped to the right customer. Simplifying shipping allows Billy and his team to focus on growing other sectors of their business. Billy hopes the mission of inclusivity and convenience will help BILLY Footwear continue to grow. The integrated solution between OptiProERP, SAP Business One and ShipStation alleviates the complexities of Billy’s fulfillment process and will allow for more scalable growth in the future.