Founded in 2001, Game Room Guys is a Michigan-based family business that helps consumers create entertainment spaces in their own homes with hundreds of fun offerings, including pinball machines, arcade games, pool tables, furniture, and other supplies. Over the years, the business has seen steady growth, expanding from just a few employees to 25 and from several hundred orders per month to over 5,000 shipments to locations across the United States. To capitalize on business growth, Game Room Guys automated order fulfillment from order creation through to parcel shipping and delivery tracking using Descartes ShipRush combined with the NetSuite enterprise resource planning system.
The Challenge: Processing and Accounting for Large Volumes of Complex Orders
In 2008, Game Room Guys began its first ecommerce sales efforts. This catalyzed a new level of growth both for the company’s brick and mortar business and via eBay and Amazon marketplaces. Game Room Guys now offers thousands of products and processes over 5,000 orders per month, everything from ping pong paddles to arcade-quality games. Over the next 10 years, the company added 15,000 feet of warehouse space and opened a second 20,000 square foot showroom. This expansion created growing pains and, to better scale the business to the increasing opportunity, the company determined it needed a backend inventory system linked with shipping and fulfillment processes without investing in a full enterprise-grade system.
From a financial perspective, Descartes ShipRush™ makes it significantly easier to find the best carrier rate and delivery option for each shipment promptly, and it connects seamlessly with our NetSuite-based inventory management and accounting solution. It’s an extremely robust product that offers deep functionality for an excellent price point.
– Eric Wildey, Chief Operating Officer, Game Room Guys
The Solution: Reduce Shipping Costs and Streamline Order Fulfilment
Because many buyers are one-time customers looking to furnish their game rooms, the company needed an efficient system to manage large volumes of unique, new customers with multiple orders from its extensive product inventory. Game Room Guys deployed the NetSuite enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for inventory management and accounting functions, and also to capture all sales orders, including from its own website and multiple online marketplaces.
Selected, in part, because of its seamless integration with NetSuite, the cloud-based Descartes ShipRush system serves as the backend order fulfillment and shipping solution for all sales channels—offering an end-to-end platform to rate shop, print labels, track shipments, process returns, and access customer information from a centralized dashboard. All orders now flow into NetSuite where fulfillment records are created and then automatically sent to Descartes ShipRush. After shipments are processed, details such as cost, tracking information and more are transmitted back to NetSuite.
Getting the best shipping rate per package is key to helping Game Room Guys offer free shipping and remain competitive. Previously, this was done by performing manual comparisons of individual carrier rates, which became extremely time-consuming and error-prone as order volumes continued to grow. Now, the company relies on the postage discounts and side-by-side carrier rate shopping capabilities in Descartes ShipRush, which not only improves productivity but also decreases costs. The company estimates a savings of at least 2 or 3 percent of their total expenses by rate shopping each shipment and choosing the best delivery option for every package. “From a financial perspective, if you are not shipping at the cheapest rate every time, you are giving away your margins,” explained Eric Wildey, COO at Game Room Guys.
Wildey also notes that the solution’s rich feature set gives Game Room Guys additional shipping flexibility with the ability to rate shop new, built-in Freight and Less than Truckload (LTL) transportation options for oversized items or large shipments. Returns are also a simple matter with easy order verification and the ability to email shipping labels directly to customers. “The level of functionality in Descartes ShipRush for the cost is excellent. We have sophisticated capabilities like rate shopping and many other features that usually do not exist at this price point,” noted Wildey. Over time, Wildey says the company will continue to benefit from a more consistent fulfillment process, including using automation functions for best practices, and reducing the number of shipping clears needed to handle ongoing increases in order volumes.