All about
Pipe17 is a connectivity hub - an intelligent pipe, if you will - for streamlining order operations. They manage order flow and inventory updates between all your Selling Channels (shopping carts, marketplaces, B2B and points of sales), Fulfillment Services (Third-Party Logistics Providers (3PLs), Warehouse Management Systems (WMSs) and Returns) and Systems of Record (Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs), Financial tools, and Inventory Management Systems) so that every order you receive is processed automatically, quickly, and error free, across all of your applications, regardless of volume. Thus removing the headache of endless spreadsheets and back and forth calls between you and your 3PLs, etc.
Think of them like a middleware between an order being placed and fulfilled. They are able to ensure the right orders are getting fulfilled in the right ways, at the right places, and through the right processes. And they are very flexible to setup specific places, rules, and processes based on your specific needs.
Pipe17 provides connectivity to 1000s of different selling channels, fulfillment services and systems of record, with new ones being added all the time. You can quickly integrate your applications and set up automated order operations within 7 days, with no code or systems integrators required. Even ERPs like NetSuite or Accumatica and accounting applications like Quickbooks or Xero can be connected quickly and seamlessly.
Once connected you can set up automatic order filtering and routing, remapping of SKUs, bundles and delivery options between all of your selling and fulfillment channels. Pipe17’s flexibility and feature-rich capabilities gives you fine-grained control of how, where and when orders are processed and transactions are recorded.
Pipe17 can filter and route orders based on tags, SKUs, locations, etc., to help optimize where to route an order based on your goals. You can set Pipe17 to pull or push orders, products, inventory, and fulfillments to each of your channels, choose when and how to sync inventory and which application is considered the “source of truth” for calculating inventory. Need to make a change to your 3PL or other service? With Pipe17 you simply swap out a connector and you are back in business.
Pipe17 provides a “live traffic” view of your order operation, monitors all end points for errors and exceptions and sends you notifications when there is a problem (like Shopify failing to process an order). They don’t offer any reporting or analytics but the recent addition of a Snowflake connector means you can take advantage of this powerful platform for business reporting.
They provide a modern open API that gives you access to all Pipe17 capabilities for running headless and incorporating Pipe17 into more complex solutions.
They offer multi-tier account management for aggregators, 3PLs and other multi account businesses that want to manage order collection by accounts but consolidate orders across accounts for fulfillment and accounting purposes.
They are not replacing your financial tools, transactional tools, order management systems, 3PL software, etc., only connecting them. Either Pipe17 will sit in the center of all of your order and inventory destinations, or they will help organize the relationship between your 3PL and ERP solution, depending on what you need to do - whether you want to sync through the ERP, through Pipe17, through Shopify, etc. Wherever you want your source of truth to be.
Pipe17 is keeping an eye on all the endpoints and sending notifications or pointing out errors in the dashboard when any issues come up, such as your Shopify not syncing appropriately.
They also help solve the fulfillment side of bundling through helping your team (and in some rules-based cases this can be done fully automatically) better combining and allocating orders.
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Pipe17 is built specifically for eCommerce merchants and retailers. They focus specifically on the order flow between applications, which makes them very different from order management, inventory management, or fulfillment tools.
Their “connectivity hub” is designed to bridge the gaps in your post-checkout tech stack. It’s like using an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), but without the complexity, because they’re hyper-focused on order operations.
Pipe17’s “connectivity-first” technology approach provides amazingly fast integration between the various applications in your post-checkout operations. Connecting your channels to tools/platforms can be literally 100X faster than competing approaches, and you don’t have to rebuild your entire solution when you change out your 3PL.
Their focus on connectivity means they are in regular communication with your application vendors and stay up to date with API changes so you don’t have to (they were one of the first companies to support Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF’s) new API that enables blank box fulfillment).
Pipe17’s focus on eCommerce means that they have deep integrations specific to merchant needs, connecting to:
- 1st tier platforms (Shopify, Amazon, Walmart etc)
- 2nd and 3rd tier platforms (ebay, ShipStation, Loop, tons of 3PLs etc)
- ERPs
And they ensure that order flows between these applications is working, reporting on any downtime or errors.
Their ability to automate order flow between your applications is what really matters. In this regard, their biggest current competitor is primarily the spreadsheets, point-to-point tools, custom written scripts, and hundreds of human hours a business uses to get the job done. This is the way of the past and, if this is you, you can quickly save time and money using Pipe17 to streamline your process.
Pipe17 is primarily going to lower your per order fulfillment costs, both by lowering resource costs and by letting you create operational efficiencies that lower your fulfillment costs (adding another 3PL, for example), shipping cost, etc. And by streamlining the order operational process (removing spreadsheets, etc.) you are going to be able to get products in the hands of customers faster, which will increase loyalty, improve customer experience, decrease customer service costs, improve margins, and generally all the good things you want to have happen in your business.
Because Pipe17 makes it so easy to connect new channels, they can make it super easy for you to launch selling channels into your existing fulfillment set up without worry or disruption. Pipe17’s ability to handle large order volumes means getting your products into the hands of your customers faster leading to higher levels of customer satisfaction and more reorders.
If you are using people and spreadsheets to do order operations work today then recovering these costs can have a positive impact on your margins. They will save you in shipping rates costs through better routing and combining of orders, thus increasing profitability and lowering landed cost.
All in all, when implemented properly, and assuming you are a growing business with complex operational processes, Pipe17 will help drive revenue growth, cost savings, and experience improvement.
They also help 3PLs grow sales, save on operational overhead, close more deals, and make it easier to integrate with more brands, getting their brands live in their system faster.
Pipe17 will typically be most beneficial to your Chief Operating Officer (COO) or CEO, head of operations, head of fulfillment, even financial operations…maybe even your 3PL. This is absolutely the type of tool where you’re going to want to demo the solution first, ask a bunch of questions around integrations, processes, what rules it can and can’t create, and make sure they are a fit for your business. They handle a TON of use cases, so odds are, it will work.
Onboarding is extremely fast when compared to other solutions in this space, getting you connected and up and running typically within 7 days. The amount of complexity involved in setting it up depends on the complexity of your business. Single channel scenarios can be easily set-up in 10 minutes, multi-channel can be easy too. The complexity comes from your own business logic: what are the rules associated with routing orders, translating SKUs etc.?
Once you have set it up, Pipe17 runs automatically, applying the logic you have configured and alerting you if something goes wrong. Your operations team may be checking into the tool daily or weekly to update orders, review alerts or errors, create new rules, manage orders, shipping and inventory, etc.
You may prefer to use their console as a central source of truth across all your orders, or you may simply use them as a smart pipe to get orders into that central source of truth (like your ERP).
If you have struggled with the cost and complexity of an iPaaS or the lack of functionality and performance with vendor connectors or point-to-point tools like Cartrover, then Pipe17 is for you.
You can use them for managing order flow between two end-points like Shopify and Amazon MCF, multiple selling and fulfillment channels or even complex multi-store scenarios. Perfect for merchants looking for ways to optimize fulfillment costs.
Pipe17 can work for brands with either simple or complex fulfillment processes.
If you are primarily Amazon focused, Pipe17 makes it easy to route orders between FBA/FBM or your 3PL and minimize interruptions from Amazon’s ever changing policies around FBA.
If you’ve got 10 warehouses across multiple regions, each managing slightly different SKU sets and pushing all your data into your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, you almost certainly need a solution like Pipe17.
Clearly though, Pipe17 is going to provide more value to those with more complex fulfillment processes - multiple warehouses, tons of SKUs, tons of sales channels (like Direct-To-Consumer, Amazon, Walmart, etc.).
You don’t want to use them for financial operations integrations, martech integrations, or anything really outside of their core four operational post-checkout workflows:
- Orders
- Fulfillment
- Product
- inventory
Pipe17 will be less relevant for dropshippers, low volume merchants, merchants shipping out of their home or small office, merchants on one channel like only Amazon or only Shopify, and retailers who do not need to fulfill many orders.