Name: The Biggest Moments from Fulfilled 2026
Uploaded: 2026-07-09T19:01:10.514Z
Duration: 43 min 40 s
Description: The Biggest Moments from Fulfilled 2026

Transcript for "The Biggest Moments from Fulfilled 2026": Hi, everyone. Hello, and thank you for joining the best moments from fulfilled twenty twenty six. As you start streaming in, drop into the chat where you're tuning in from. We'd love to hear from you. And today, we are bringing our favorite moments and announcements from our flagship event. This is our fifth fulfilled event, and we're bringing it for the first time to a webinar format. So this is our our first time with a fulfilled recap, and we're really excited to share with you clips of the highlights over the next thirty minutes. But you'll also we had, this was a three day event. So we have tons of sessions recorded from the event, and you will get a completely ungated playlist of every session to your inbox tomorrow. So, with that said, let's get started with some intros. For those of you that haven't joined our product release webinars over the last five years, my name is Britney Baron. I lead our brand and product marketing team here at ShipBob, and I'm super excited to be joined by Amanda Flynn, ShipBob's SVP of marketing. And, Amanda, since this is your first ShipBob webinar, would love for you to share a quick intro with the group. happy to. Thanks, Britney. Hello, everyone. I'm about six months into my ShipBob journey, and I'm ready for my webinar debut. So thank you for having me. I spent the last roughly twenty or so years in marketing and advertising. And I once had a boss say to me, if you wanna get anything done, just host an event. And after fulfilled, I believe that more than ever. There is something that happens when you get the right people in a room together, merchants talking to merchants, ideas turning into decisions, problems that have been sitting on a shelf for months suddenly get solved. And that energy, even the chaos, the bias towards action, that feeling that something is actually moving forward, that's what fulfilled, really is. And that's why I love it, and I'm really excited to be here today, to talk about it. So thanks for having me. Awesome. Thanks, Amanda. Well, let's get into it. So for those of you who couldn't make it to fulfilled, we'll give you a quick video recap of what you missed. I think that video did a great job of capturing some of the Vegas excitement. Over the next thirty minutes, we'll cover off four additional things or highlights. One is some of my favorite merchant moments from the sessions. Two is a preview of ShipBob's AI direction, and we'll feature MCP and Bobby. We'll give you a a little bit of an update on ShipBob Promise, and then we'll also give a sneak peek, to all of you on where fulfilled is headed next. So let's get into it. This was our fifth fulfilled half a decade of bringing our community together. And over the course of three days, we hosted over 300 attendees. We had a hundred and twenty and thirty five speakers in the room connecting and sharing ideas, with like minded brand owners and operators. And, like Britney mentioned, this is our first time bringing that content and community into a virtual room. So we're excited to to share some bits and pieces of it. The theme that, kept coming back to us is all about connection and community. And, yes, of course, there's strategy and operations and product news, but what makes it different is the merchants in the room talking to each other, sharing what's working, being honest about what's hard and what's not working, and that's really the spirit of what I want to bring to today's session. So I'm excited to cover off some of our favorite moments. The first moment I wanna highlight came from our headline sponsor, Passport. Their cofounder and CEO, Alex Jonker, shared an interesting insight, and that insight is your customers are already global. And what Alex challenged the room is if we are meeting them where they're at. So go ahead and and play the clip. So I'll start with this. Every brand is already global day one. I encourage every brand here to go to their Google Analytics and see where their traffic is coming from. And the mistake is not monetizing it because I wouldn't be surprised if every brand here has at least double digits traffic from countries around the world and some really easy to serve countries like Canada where everybody speaks English, It's a pretty wealthy country and frankly, it's, it's, some misconceptions are out there of what, you can ship, how you can ship. Some brands I still run into this issue a lot where brands seem to think sometimes that you have to change your packaging. Oh, I'm going into the Canada market. I have to change my packaging. I have to change the labels. There's different label requirements. That is true, but it's true for B2B. It's true if you want to carry products on the shelves in a Canada, in a Canada, say, supermarket or store. It's not true if you want to do d2c. Countries have this thing called personal exemption. Okay? Personal use exemptions, which means you can ship a, a b to c shipment and not have to change any of your packaging. So I would say it's just a mistake not to monetize the the traffic that you're already getting. I wanna reiterate what Alex said, and that is every brand is already global on day one. Most brands treat international as a future state problem, something that they'll tackle once they figured out domestic. But Alex's whole argument was that this is exactly backwards. The infrastructure exists today. The demand is there. What's missing is the conviction to treat global as a channel you build intentionally, not one you just stumble into. And what I loved about his session was really how practical it got. It wasn't just a platitude of go international, but he really was thoughtful about sharing how you sequence it, where brands get stuck, and he gave some real playbook, takes. So if cross border is on your roadmap, even in the back of your mind, this session is definitely, worth watching the recording of. And the great news is that you don't have to figure this out on your own. By leveraging your partnerships and our community of operations leaders, going global can be easy, in your, next step of your growth journey. ShipBob is connected into over a 100 plus applications across the supply chain ecosystem, and leading tech partners like Passport and FlavorCloud are here to help navigate your global expansion without adding headcount or any additional headaches. So the lesson here is really let the experts figure out your international footprint, taxes, and the rest so that you can focus on what you do best. Another favorite session was with Ali Shahid, who is the COO at Our Place. He gave us some, really great perspectives on using omnichannel as a growth lever. Let's play the clip. So our genesis was in direct to consumer. Direct to consumer is still a very healthy business, but Amazon and Costco is where we are seeing the greatest growth. Amazon launched two years ago and today it's almost 30% of our total sales. Amazon also has about three times the return on ad spend that we are seeing on our direct to consumer business. So our profitability on Amazon at a unit level is greater than it is on direct to consumer even with platform fees and higher fulfillment fees. I get asked frequently about cannibalization because there is a natural tension between channels at times. Every test we've run to try and gauge cannibalization between direct to consumer and Amazon has come up inconclusive. I'm sure there are some, but it's insignificant enough that it's hard to measure. So if there are any operators in the room who are still debating to Amazon or not to Amazon, please come find me, I have thoughts. But if you are doing it right, I'd say invest in it. Amazon has a buyer. It just happens to be an algorithm and it rewards you if you play by the rules, right? So as an example, Amazon prefers it if you send inventory into their hubs known as FBA or Fulfilled by Amazon. So at this point in time, we are sending in over 600,000 items from Amazon from Shibop to our Amazon hubs annually. And by doing so, we've seen a 30% increase in conversion. The other partner that is very promising is Costco. We sell on costco.com and we participate in roadshows. It's the image that you can see in front of you. I'll explain Costco roadshows to those of you who do not shop at Costco. So at any point in time, right, sorry, about 300 times a year, we end up at a Costco store and we're there for about ten days and this is our own in house sales team that does so. And the sales that they do in that ten day period are very significant. They add up to a nice little business that gives us incrementality and visibility. Now Costco roadshows are operationally intense because 300 times a year we are having to send inventory into these stores and then all unsold inventory has to be brought back, but Shiba has been enabling all of that for us. Between Amazon and Costco, we are probably talking about 40% of the total business at this point in time, which we would not have had if we were a direct to consumer only brand. Similar to going global, brands look at launching their next sales channel as another layer of complexity to their business. There's a lot that can go wrong, expensive chargebacks for sending inventory to retailers incorrectly. You can get penalized or even deplatformed if you don't follow retailer guidelines, or maybe you're worried about cannibalization between Amazon and your d two c site. The hardest part is that there isn't just one way to do it right, and Our Place's omnichannel strategy is a really great example of that. Amazon is almost 30% of their total business, and they see a three x return on ad spend from d to c even with platform fees and higher fulfillment fees. And towards you if you play by the rules. And for example, they prefer it if you send inventory to their hubs with fulfilled by Amazon or FBA. Our place uses ShipBob's FBA program to send this inventory to Amazon so they don't have to worry about getting it wrong. They also sell on costco.com and participate in Costco roadshows. You heard Ali talk a little bit about that. It's really hard to run 300 plus of these roadshows each year. They have to send items to each Costco, and any unsold items have to be returned to their warehouse. And this is a unique form of b to b. Usually, you're thinking of b two b as getting on shelves at Target or selling on Walmart Marketplace, but ShipBob helps them with all of it. Almost half of our place's total business comes from these partnerships with Amazon and Costco, and they couldn't do it alone. They leveraged their network to support their omnichannel strategy. This session sparked some great conversation, and it was a good reminder that scale is a choice. The brands that do it well are making very intentional decisions at every step. They're not just optimizing for growth. Last but not least, I led a beauty health and wellness panel, and one thing that stuck out is, that most brands think fulfillment is what happens after the product is great. You can have a product and, good good product and good marketing, but if your operations fall short, then you can't grow. And what I wanna emphasize is that partnerships is what helps you scale, whether that is operational and tech partners or your brand community to foster ideas. Your ecommerce community is your lever for growth. And we run events like this, like fulfilled, private dinners that I'm sure some of you have attended to help you grow your network and share ideas with like minded brand owners and operators. And so I really hope that you continue, to participate in those because it's those experiences that help us all grow as a community. We hosted several, panels across a variety of industries. And so, apparel, health and wellness, beauty, food and beverage, is is just an example of some of those. There's one that I wanna flag for this session. Kaizen Food and Chamberlin Coffee had some great advice, for their brands in the room regardless of your category. So let's play the clip. What's a piece of advice you'd give another customer or prospect that's with us today that's just getting started in the food and beverage category? I think start slow. Don't don't jump into the biggest of opportunities without being ready for it because it can definitely really go wrong. So start slow and get it right initially. And then when you're ready, you can you can start expanding to other channels or other markets. I think it's very easy to get get caught up in, like, get dollar signs in in your eyes, and you you chase an opportunity that isn't necessarily something you're ready for. So just, yeah, starting slow. Let's say Yeah. I'd say inventory management. We've we've learned this the hard way. You know, having inventory in the wrong places is probably worse than having no inventory at all. Cash is king. I I I'm sure everyone's heard that before. And so it's, it's it's amazing what, you know, too much inventory can do do to a business. So start slow, work with experts to get your next step right, and lean on your community for ideas and feedback. And, of course, cash is king. So those are some of my favorite moments from the merchant side of the event. What really made this year's event feel different was the quality of the conversations, both on stage and off, And the brands showing up to Fulfilled aren't just shopping for a three p l. They're building something, and they want to be in a room with other people doing the same thing. So thank you for reliving some of my favorite moments. Hopefully, we'll see some of you back in the room when we do this again, which we'll talk about at the very end. But for now, Britney, over to you. Awesome. Thank you so much, Amanda. And those are some great moments. I especially loved, Ali's session and his hot takes. I think around omnichannel are so valuable for y'all to to listen in on. So now for the part that I I get most excited about when I think about events and what ShipBob does, the product and technology moments from Fulfilled. And I think while Amanda said, you know, community and the relationships that are built are such a huge part of Fulfilled, another big star of the show Fulfilled this year was all of the innovation, the discussion around AI, and a lot of this came to life in, several sessions that I will touch on now. So, with that said, I will dig into the first highlight, session, which this is one you really need to tune in and listen to the recording on. We're not actually gonna play a clip, but Melissa opened up our second day with her road map session, which she typically does at Fulfilled every year, and there was a lot packed into it. So too much to play in the clips, but the part I wanted to really pull out and leave y'all with and was a, you know, just a huge takeaway, I think, for operators and why we love to do Fulfilled every year is is really how she opened it. So you can go to the next slide. She started out with 12 features, which I'll show you in a second, but it wasn't what's coming. She covered that a bit later. We had plenty of that. But what has already shipped over the past year that was actually requested at fulfilled during our customer feedback sessions the prior year at fulfilled 2025? So you can show those 12. So all of these came straight from the feedback that I'm sure many of you on the call that were there that were joined us at last year's fulfilled provided. So this is always been really ShipBob's commitment to the merchants we work with, but I thought this was such a great way to kick off the second day, and show the the real work that was done over the last year based on the inputs and real business and operations and fulfillment problems that our merchants were facing. We did the customer feedback sessions again, this past fulfilled. So we are going through all of that feedback now, and we're really excited to share more of that with you very soon. So highlight two before Lindsay plays the clip. This is a big one. If you were at fulfilled, you know it. You may have heard about it from folks coming out of Fulfilled, but one of the biggest product releases we announced at Fulfilled at Fulfilled is Promise. So Lindsay is going to play a clip of Melissa so you can get a real feel for it. So, Lindsay, over to you. If you look at the bottom right, it has a specific date, how long they have to order the item, their zip code confirmed, doesn't say three to five business days. It says it will be there by Wednesday. And if the order is not going to be on time and make that date, we flag it automatically and we reroute it. It's not a silent failure. The shopper never even sees the problem and you don't have to manage it. We manage it. Let's show let me show you what's under the hood. Did you like that f one reference under the hood? So this is how it actually works. The moment the order is created, our Promise engine is already running. It's looking at every fulfillment center to ZIP code to carrier combination and looking at real time data throughout our entire network to establish a Promise date. Live data, not an average, we're looking at real time data as volume flows through the network. We model the carrier transit time at a 95% confidence interval. That 95% is really important. We don't model it at a 100 because we're not going to pretend that everything happens perfectly within the network. The 95% is monitored consistently to make sure that we can nail that promise. And then we don't stop watching. We watch that package journey. After fulfillment, we reevaluate that route. If conditions change, if a carrier is running late, a fulfillment center gets closed because there was a snowstorm, we're watching all of that and and behind the scenes we can reroute and make sure that the shopper receives that package on the promised date or before. This is what real time monitoring unlocks for us. It's not a dashboard that you have to check on. It's a system that catches the problem and takes proactive action to address it real time. Now this is only possible because we built the entire stack, the data, the rating engine, the WMS. We own the carrier relationships. And it's not just about accuracy. It's also about cost as well. You're not overpaying for a speed that you actually don't need. Every package in our network is someone's special moment. That's the way we need to think about it. Could be an anniversary. Could be a birthday gift that my husband bought for me too late. It only works if the package absolutely arrives on time. Special memories don't reschedule, neither should a delivery date. So that was one you can't miss. You can tune in to the full session, but this is one that I think me and many others are most excited about. An estimated delivery date solution that you can really trust, and is our commitment to you to deliver on is on its way. So this is a behemoth of a project that is, I I think, maybe years in the making in terms of a foundational perspective. So we are, currently in testing with limited beta going through the rest of the year, and we'll be launching this in The US. More general availability next year. So much more to come on promise, but check out Melissa's session for an unveiling of what's to come very soon. And this brings me to the last but certainly not least highlight number three and really what I think is ended up being one of the core themes and threads throughout the entire event. It showed up across almost every session. I think we all see it in our lives every day, all day, and this is AI and how it's transforming supply chain. So Dhruv really set the tone. He opened the event, with remarks around his take that and I think it's really worth hearing a bit of his take. He's a founder. He's also an engineer at heart. If you don't know the ShipBob founder story, Dhruv and Dave are both engineers, and this has really shaped how ShipBob has been built from day one and from the ground up with all of our homegrown platform that we've invested in since 2014. It sets us up in a really rare position to put AI to work across our entire tech stack. You even heard Melissa reference, some of how that makes promise easier for us. It certainly makes rolling out AI quickly and its scale much easier for ShipBob. So instead of me blabbing on about it, let's hear it from Dhruv. So, Lindsay, if you could roll the clip. So the way software gets built is changing in real time. AI is collapsing the cost of creating software, testing ideas, and automating workflows. Something that would take us quarters and years can now be done in days. But there's a trap here. A storefront can become AI ready very, very quickly. A supply chain cannot. Because supply chain is not just software. It is inventory, human labor, warehouses, exceptions and customers trust. But that does not stop every supply chain company from having an AI story right now. However, the companies that win in this AI native era will not be the ones with the best AI press release. They will be the ones with the strongest APIs, the cleanest operational data, and the deepest action layer underpinning all of it. AI without an action layer is just a smarter dashboard. However, in supply chain, a smarter dashboard is not enough. The real question is, can AI see the orders and understand inventory availability? Can it trigger a reshipment on a lost or delayed order? Does it know that a reshipment must have an upgraded or a faster carrier? The ability to take action, that is the stack that matters. And that stack is hard to build because supply chain is physical. There is no AI shortcut around inventory, warehouses, labor, SLAs and delivery promises. We at ShipBob have been building that stack for the last ten plus years. So our AI story is not that we added AI on top. Our AI story is that ShipBob is the action layer that AI needs to operate in fulfillment. Very powerful. So Dhruv's framing really matters. When your foundation is built by engineers, AI isn't just a feature you add on later. It's something you build into how the whole platform works. So it you can skip this this one. So moving on to, a second AI session that Dhruv and Sagr led. It was actually on day two, and I think the most popular voted session based on all the feedback I've gotten from attendees so far and our very first live demo that we've ever done at Fulfilled. So huge shout out to Sagar and Drew for, a successful live demo on stage. So on day two, they, sat down up on stage and showed off two things that we're really proud of, and I'll quickly take you through. And you're gonna be hearing a lot more about them. These two things are ShipBob's MCP and our new AI agent, Bobby. So first, let me show you a little bit about MCP. K. Well, my demo did not go as well as Sagar's, so I just unveiled Bobby to you. So I'll go back to MCP here in a second. So, Lindsay, if you can go to the slide that says meet Bobby, please. Awesome. So you did what you just saw was Bobby, which we unveiled at the end of their AI, live MCP walk through. And, I'll go back to that here in a second. But Bobby is was brand new for everyone in the the audience. This is our brand new AI agent. So our MCP that I'll go over in a second, you'll be able to access via cloud, API, where whatever agent. Bobby is really think of it as the equivalent of that, but directly in ShipBob's dashboard. So, this is currently available. You can join the wait list now. Many of you have. We've got a a huge wait list, and we're about to start the beta test testing period really next week, and it should be coming for all users later this fall. So we are truly helping to build the tools that help you run your business, and, you can take advantage of Bobby very soon. So we'll also chat more much more about that in our summer release. And so quickly, I'll go back to the MCP, which, Dhruv and Sagar went through. And I think many of our customers, we realized, didn't know about ShipBob's MCP. So what they did was walk through not only how to use ShipBob's MCP, but how easy it is to set it up today. So today, we have a custom connector. You can follow our API documentation, and if you scan that QR code right there, it'll take you to that page. But it's very easy to set it up. And then they walked through a few use cases, but really, the use cases are kind of endless. A couple of things they did were to build out kind of like an executive level report of all of the metrics, you know, an operations leader might care about. So that is looking at the data, reading the data within the ShipBob dashboard and surfacing it in Claude in an easy digestible way that you can send to your, other operations coworkers. But they also showed, and what I think really Dhruv calls out, in his opening remarks is the the action layer. So ShipOps MCP doesn't just allow you to be able to look up the data in cloud. You can actually take action. So across our MCP right now today, we have about 72 tools across 10 domains, and the use cases go way beyond what they were even able to fit into one session. So check out their, their session, but also look out for more live events of us running through our MCP. We'll have our summer release coming up, and we really want to hear from y'all as you start to use our MCP and tools like Bobby become available, you know, how these tools are helping you. So Amanda and I went through a lot. Please catch up on the sessions and, you know, join us for summer release. But before we thank everyone for attending, I'll hand it over to Amanda to talk through some amazing events coming up. Yes. Thank you, Britney. And I love the preview, of Bobby and MCP. Those are the two things that I am getting asked the most questions about. So I love that we spent a little bit of time on it today. I love that we're ending with it. Before we let everybody go, though, I just want folks to know where to find us next so we can continue the conversation. And I'm gonna start with the middle. Later this year, we're bringing Fulfilled International with an event in London on 09/10. It's our first global Fulfilled Roadshow event. So if it makes sense for you all to be there, the invite is out there. Next year, we're bringing Fulfilled Home. So Fulfilled twenty twenty seven will be at ShipBob headquarters in Chicago, my home city. We'd love to see you there. It's a great time to be in Chicago. And last but not least, if you wanna learn more about any of the releases that we talked about today, especially Bobby, especially MCP, delivery promise, register for the summer release that is coming up at the end of the month to hear more. We also have the links over in the documents tab for you to click through. You can scan the QR code. And that's a wrap. Thank you so much for tuning in with us today. And Thanks, everyone.