From fast fashion to sustainable fashion- here’s how a consignment brand automated their onboarding process to streamline their operations in a stylish way! The cost of style has always been a price paid by the environment, with the industry’s consistently evolving needs and trends, the pace of the fashion industry becomes strenuous on the world with its heavy consumption of water, plastic and waste materials. However with the ever growing concerns of climate change, all eyes have been on the fashion industry to make a change! People have realised that trends often make a comeback, and have started to embrace the culture of styling with sustainability!
This fashion conscious effort has given rise to a lot of thrifty, vintage stores and marketplaces. One such marketplace focused on upcycling the luxurious treasures from one customer's wardrobe to another’s realised that they needed a quicker way to facilitate the exchange of hands and hence turned to automation to solve their problem!
Why automate?
To understand what drove the brand to automate their process, let's well try to fit in their shoes and walk through a typical day in their workplace pre automation!
The consignment brand works by onboarding buyers as partners! Essentially the marketplace is a platform for curated luxury items wherein buyers and sellers can interact. The brand acts as a mediator, assessing the quality of the products and then listing a fair price on the website which is agreed upon by the seller. The platform keeps a part of the sale as commission anytime a buyer makes a sale and the rest is given to the seller.
There are various steps involved in this process, that makes the workflow lengthy and complicated!Steps like:
- Getting a confirmation on the price agreed upon by the seller pre listing.
- Managing returns and rejections for items that didn’t meet the requirements of the quality check.
- Managing the inventory of items from multiple sellers.
- Finding a way to contractually have a clear agreement in place with all sellers to avoid any disputes in pricing later on.
In order to fulfil these steps the team would have to manually contact sellers through emails or phone calls, draft agreements, get their signatures, etc. This process involved the need for multiple interactions between the team and sellers, making the process of seller onboarding lengthy.
The brand realised that in order to attract more buyers and sellers onto their platform they needed a way to make their process simple and hence turned to Quickwork automation to streamline their daily logistics!
How did automation help streamline the marketplaces onboarding process?
After understanding the workflow process of the brand, Quickwork developed an offer price agreement form which could help automate the entire onboarding process. The form contains details about the products a seller wishes to list, his/her desired price, the condition of the products, images, etc. Upon submission of the form, the brand would go through a sellers information and send an email with an attachment to the seller. The email contains a proposal of the suggested prices for listing and an agreement which the seller signs electronically to finalise the onboarding process.
How did this change the daily workflow for the platform
By creating a templated form for seller communications, the brand was able to streamline their logistical operations. The form allowed for a quicker, more systematic way for the team to go through all the seller responses, reduced the need for multiple phone calls or emails and hence allowed for faster onboarding. Automation also helped keep a track of the communication, since both parties now had access to a transparent paper trail, documenting all their transactions hence resulting in lesser disputes. Overall the brand was able to reduce their price confirmation process from a week long process to just a day, giving them more time to focus on other more creative aspects of the business.
Simplify your business by automating your workflow with the help of Quickwork iPaaS. Get in touch with us now to kickstart your journey to streamlining for success with automation!
