How Chargebee Scripted The Deliverr ECommerce Success Story

Republished By Plato

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Deliverr aggregates orders from thousands of online merchants who are selling their products on different eCommerce marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, or standalone eCommerce websites powered by Shopify, BigCommerce, etc. They work with warehouses to fulfil orders, and help to ensure fast shipment and delivery to end consumers. This helps thousands of smaller online merchants compete with Amazon’s 2-day delivery.

The Problem

Since Deliverr works on a usage-based business model, i.e they charge their merchants for every order that is fulfilled, they need a billing solution that supports a usage-based pricing model.
Deliverr invoices over 4,500 active merchants once every two weeks cumulatively, for any/all orders fulfilled during that period. That translates into nearly 10,000 invoices each month! But as a young business, Deliverr has a very lean team with just five people to manage the entire finance function. They needed a solution that could allow them to manage their billing and accounts receivables in a highly automated fashion, while also being scalable to keep up with their fast-growing business requirements.
Managing such a high volume of invoices also meant following up on a large number of unpaid invoices. This entailed handling payment failures, outdated payment information, and sending reminders to ensure payments are collected on time. ‘In any 30-day period, we used to have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unpaid invoices’, says Daniel Chen, Finance Manager at Deliverr.

The Solution

Deliverr was able to automate their entire billing operations and accounts receivables with Chargebee. This made collecting revenue a breeze for the finance team. ’Thanks to Chargebee, I spend no more than 1-2 hours every week on accounts receivables’, Daniel tells us. That’s roughly eight hours a month to manage close to 10,000 invoices for over 4,500 merchants!
With Smart Dunning, Deliverr is able to automatically attempt and collect payments on overdue invoices. This has helped bring down the number of unpaid invoices. ‘With the Smart Dunning optimization, our unpaid invoices have gone down significantly over the last 6-12 months. In any 30 day period, we now have less than $20,000 in unpaid invoices, which is a big improvement. Compared to our total revenue, it is pretty insignificant. We have been able to reduce our unpaid invoices by at least 80% while we have grown by 600%’, says Daniel.
With the AR Ageing Report, Daniel and his team are able to figure out which merchants have unpaid invoices past their due date (outside of the dunning period). Using this information, Daniel performs a bulk operation to attempt collection on all overdue invoices at once. Daniel also uses Chargebee’s email templates to trigger an email reminder to nudge merchants to complete their payments.

The Payoff

Deliverr’s support team is now able to resolve customer queries with ease. Thanks to Chargebee’s easy and intuitive user interface, support reps can go into customer or subscription details and provide answers. eg. when customers have questions about charges levied on their invoices
Deliverr plans to build an in-house accounting team. Since their books are maintained on Sage Intacct, the accounting team will be able to grow into the Chargebee-Sage Intacct integration to automate subscription accounting.
With aggressive growth plans for the next five years, Deliverr aims to enter new markets like Europe. They would need to integrate with more payment gateways and support more payment methods. ‘Chargebee has all the functionality that we need and the functionality we expect to grow into in the next five years. This will help us to continue to grow with Chargebee over a period of time’, says Daniel.

Billing is arguably the most important piece of the entire lifecycle of a transaction. Chargebee has been instrumental in helping us scale to the level we are at now, even with a fairly limited headcount.
Daniel Chen, Finance Manager, Deliverr