Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: AfterShip CEO Andrew Chan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Which platform was the first one that you started getting traction on?

Andrew Chan: Shopify and eBay as well.

Sramana Mitra: Just to get a feel for this strategy, what you’re describing is a strategy that we have picked up on from various case studies that we have covered. We call it Bootstrapping by Piggybacking on Platforms. It’s a strategy of going to market that is working very well for a lot of small startups. As you pointed out, you’re going to market without a sales team. You are able to go to market by riding on somebody else’s marketing channel.

Andrew Chan: Atlassian bought a solution called Status Page. They host the page for the brands so that brands will use the status page under Atlassian to promote their status. That creates word-of-mouth publicity. Same for us, we got the branded tracking page, which helps give brands a similar solution so that they can create their own look and feel for shipment tracking. They can also do marketing. That also creates a marketing opportunity for us because brands will see the other brands using us.

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to understand what you just said. You were doing on Atlassian?

Andrew Chan: Atlassian was just an example. Status Page is a solution that monitors API status. They monitor whether the API is up or down. What they do is create a page for brands. If you are a business and see a solution like Status Page, you’ll be curious about how to provide such a solution.

It’s the same for us as well. We have a solution called Tracking Page. It helps brands to allow customers to track packages on a page. With the visibility of that page, it helps brands. Other companies would come to us when they see the solution in other brands’ pages.

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at right now? You said you have 600 customers?

Andrew Chan: We got 10,000 customers. We have 300 employees.

Sramana Mitra: What is your pricing? How much are people paying?

Andrew Chan: Merchants and individuals can subscribe online. We have multiple products. Let’s focus on the shipment tracking. It can be completely free, where you can have 50 shipments per month. The starting plan is $9 per month if you subscribe annually. Then you can go up to a thousand dollars. Enterprise starts at $2,000 a month. That’s the usual enterprise entry point.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Where are you going from here? What are the trends that you see?

Andrew Chan: There are a few things. Privacy is a concern. Customers don’t like spam or SMS. Apple has this email privacy update. They don’t allow marketers or publishers to track the open rate. It will impact the market. For example, auto follow-up emails. That’s one key thing for privacy.

Brands now will focus on the post-purchase on transactional email because that is not marketing. You need to get consent as well. The brands will focus a lot on updates. That’s one trend.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: AfterShip CEO Andrew Chan
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