Scaling technology for an expanding fulfilment network

 

Background

Redbubble is a print-on-demand marketplace that works with a network of third-party printers to print and ship physical products to Redbubble customers. Launching new physical products is a key revenue growth driver for Redbubble, attracting new customers to the site and re-engaging existing customers and artists.

Context

Before creating this product, each physical product launch would take 4 to 18 weeks of Redbubble engineering time. This created a constraint on how well Redbubble could scale for artists and customers. Following a series of internal stakeholder interviews and workshops, it was identified that optimising how Redbubble works with fulfillers would have the most impact to the speed of physical product launch.

Particularly, the engineering effort to onboard a new fulfilment partner was substantial, mostly spent in discussions and building alignment about the custom integrations for each partner.

Process and actions

Throughout discovery and delivery, I used an iterative discovery and delivery approach, including the following:

  • Site visits to fulfillers and interviews

  • Technical review of fulfiller integrations

  • Further internal interviews (operations and quality teams, engineering teams)

  • Comparative company assessments

  • Partnership with engineering and design to align on solution to build a common communication protocol to work with all fulfillers

Outputs

Over the course of 12 months, we did the following:

  • Created a standardised protocol for transactional communications (instead of bespoke for each fulfilment partner)

  • Built a front-end portal for fulfillers to access documentation and perform self-service testing

Finally, there was an additional 6 months of part-time support assisting fulfilment partners complete their migration to the new protocol using the portal.

Screenshot of the portal

Hub screenshot.png

Impact

  • Engineering time to onboard a fulfiller decreased by 98%1
  • Previously unfeasible projects became a reality, including launching 16 new physical products in FY20202, up from 5 new products the previous year3; these 16 products drove $17M in incremental revenue during that year4

  • This technology was instrumental for supporting increased order volume during peaks while providing a great customer experience:

    • As of FY2020, 96% of orders are shipped locally, up from ~87% in FY20165
    • As of October 2020, there are 41 fulfiller locations6, up from 24 in June 20177