At OGOship, our mission is to give you the best, full-service, globally optimized order fulfillment experience possible.
That means we do more than ship orders out to your customers. We work with you to get products in, then handle your inventory management, stock checks, warehousing, shelf management, picking and packing, shipment prep, and product delivery.
It’s a modern, comprehensive 3PL solution developed for boundaryless e-commerce. And, our order management system myOGO has taken its place as a competitive differentiator.
We all know that there are a few critical, make-or-break aspects to e-commerce:
- Rapid delivery that keeps impatient customers in the loop
- Sustainable delivery options for eco-minded customers
- Efficient inventory management to save money and stay lean
There are other things you need to get right, of course, like selling something people want.
But suboptimal inventory management, poor demand forecasting, inaccurate warehouse distribution, and out-of-control cost-per-pick will rack up your expenses. And unreliable shipping leaves customers highly disappointed.
This is why perfecting fast, reliable, cost-effective, order fulfillment is our sole focus.
Developing a custom-made order management system
With the right order management system, you can sell globally, stay lean, and affordably scale when ready.
So, what makes this all possible?
OGOship’s order management system is powered by our proprietary in-house build, myOGO. It syncs what’s happening at your e-commerce store, with the warehouse and shipping.
True, many order management systems will do this. But myOGO is more flexible and robust than most.
If you want to sell across platforms, maintain multiple store brands, and expand your shipping reach, myOGO will effortlessly handle your operations.
We know that e-commerce entrepreneurs don’t want to limit who they can sell to. So, we built an order management system that would do this for you. Right from the ground up.
And we have an entire team of in-house developers dedicated to delivering the features that will give you the best order fulfillment experience possible.
Meet the team
We have around a dozen software developers, architects, and integration specialists solely working on myOGO. Leading the team is the experienced Pekka Ylenius, Co-Founder and CTO at OGOship.
This product development team works closely with our customer success department. They rely on customer success to serve as a liaison, with the forward-facing customer team passing insights back to product development.
So, what drives the product developers, what is their methodology, and what they have planned next? It’s time for a look behind the scenes at what it takes to develop a customer-centric order management system.
To take us behind the scenes, we had a chat with one of the members of the team, project manager Matti.
Behind the scenes with OGOship’s product development team
Why do we need our own order management software myOGO?
There are many order management software solutions as well as various warehouse management software solutions already out there. So, why has OGOship decided to develop a new one, myOGO?
"OGOship wanted to develop its own order management software because our operational model is so different that ready-made products just don’t cut it", Matti explains.
myOGO actually combines both order management and warehouse management features, so it really is a unique combination.
On top of that, we support some quite complex setups, that could not be done with most off-the-shelf solutions. "A setup like this could, for example, be multiple warehouses attached to the same e-commerce platform and the other way around, with multiple stores attached to one stock", Matti says.
In addition, myOGO supports selling products in your own store and marketplaces, using the same stock and order fulfillment service. As the e-commerce business is constantly evolving, it is important to give the customers as much flexibility as we can to sell their products in many different ways.
Giving our customers the ability to scale
Let's dive into more insight and overall thoughts behind the product. Matti, can you talk a little about the different features in myOGO?
"The variety of features and alternatives to set up your merchant profile are there because we want to give our customers a platform to grow their business. You might start with one stock and one store, shipping from your living room. But when the business grows, that's not going to be enough", Matti explains.
The same is true when you grow even more. There are always new needs the platform needs to be able to support. You might have already established a working 3PL partnership that ships efficiently from one fulfillment center. But as you grow, even more, you need more features.
Maybe you want to ship to Central Europe from the Netherlands to the UK market from our UK warehouse, and cater for the Nordic region from Tallin – for example. Or maybe you need one store for your B2B customers and another for B2C customers, but you still want to utilize the same stock for both.
"We need to be able to cater to all the more advanced needs our merchants have, while still making it easy to manage. You need to have a solution that helps you scale and be efficient", says Matti.
Optimizing order fulfillment with advanced insight
Companies are looking for ways to optimize their processes and develop new services. Many times the answers are found in data. Companies are becoming more and more data-driven, and OGOship has a lot to offer here as well.
"Besides enabling scaling and growing by advanced features, we also want to be able to give insights into each of our customer’s order fulfillment processes. For example, if we see that a customer ships from a certain warehouse location but would actually save money by shipping products from another warehouse closer to the end customers, we could then suggest switching warehouses", Matti highlights.
There are already many useful features in myOGO today for the e-commerce merchants to get insight and reports about the performance of their order fulfillment, but in the future, it is important to be able to help our merchants to plan ahead and use data not only for analysis of performance but for predictive analysis as well to optimize future performance.
How does the team decide which features to develop
Matti explains that the requirements for new features can come from two sources:
- Our strategic steering group has a vision of which direction the product should go and what they see the future of the business looks like.
- Our customer success team works closely with our customers, and they get insights for the development team as they work with the customers.
These are combined into our product roadmap. The dev team uses agile methods with design sprints and the new features are developed according to the plan.
"In addition to these, we of course, also have a track where we do quick development if a customer needs something or there is something we need to solve. These tasks have their own schedule that is not dependent on the product roadmap", Matti continues.
The instant needs might be for example a new integration to some e-commerce platform that we don’t yet support or an integration to a marketplace, for example.
myOGO currently has over 25 ready-made e-commerce platform integrations as well as marketplace integrations, and new ones are developed all the time.
A hint of what’s coming next
How does the product roadmap look like, any new exciting features coming up?
"Well, the tech team obviously can’t say anything definitive at this point or make any promises, but it's clear that they monitor closely what the customer feedback is, what they would need when they are growing and that is of course an important consideration in everything we do", Matti states.
Looking at the big picture, all the features that enable our customers’ growth are important. It may be, like mentioned above, going towards enabling more advanced ways to utilize data for better understanding and better business decisions for our customers, and moving from reporting and analysis to features that enable predictive analysis.
In other words, it means that besides providing data and insights that answer the question of what happened, we can provide tools to start getting answers to the question of what will happen – whether it is about optimizing stock, re-stocking, reducing C02 emissions, optimizing shipping routes, or any aspect of the process.
OGOship’s core vision for e-commerce order fulfillment
When the development team knows the big picture and vision, it is much easier for them to prioritize and make the right decisions in their everyday work.
"Our vision with myOGO is clear: we want to make the phase between a purchase from the e-commerce store to the point the goods are delivered as easy as possible for our customers", Matti continues.
The design driver is to make the order fulfillment phase work so smoothly and so easily to our customers that they will just love using myOGO and being our customers.
The development team is very committed to this vision and has strong ownership of the product. Ownership in this sense includes being proud of the product and working hard every day to make sure the product is as good as it can possibly be. Without this kind of mindset, the end product wouldn't be successful.
Always customer-centric
Making our customers happy is at the heart of everything OGOship does. We are constantly developing new features, aimed at strengthening your key metrics and competitive differentiators.
Things like improving your cost-per-order, cutting down on warehousing costs, slicing shipping time, and letting you operate with more sustainability. All within OGOship, to eliminate the need for excessive apps or multiple order management systems.
We can’t wait to roll the next features out. And there’s plenty more in our development pipeline.
So, what are you looking for in your order fulfillment tool? The chances are we already got you.
Have a chat with our e-commerce specialists, let us know what features you’re interested in and how we can better power your e-commerce operations. We are waiting to hear from you.
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