Scaling Growth with Streamlined Ecommerce Parcel Shipping

Aroma Retail, a leading environmental scenting company, streamlined and scaled ecommerce shipping workflows using the cloud-based Descartes XPS™ multi-carrier parcel shipping solution. With seamless order importing, hassle-free integration with Shopify, rate shopping at checkout, automated label printing, and shipment tracking through delivery, Descartes XPS helped the retailer increase productivity, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience to drive rapid domestic and international growth. 

Before the company’s order volumes exploded from a handful of daily orders shipped within the U.S. to 4,000+ domestic and international orders per month, Aroma Retail initially offered a flat rate parcel shipping fee. To give buyers greater choice, the retailer wanted a cloud-based, multi-carrier shipping solution that could provide rate shopping during checkout. In addition, access to boutique-style customer support for the solution was an important consideration to help the company manage its aggressive growth trajectory. Aroma Retail needed a reliable, agile solution to support both seasonal peaks and regular marketing-driven volume spikes, without slowing down the website or holding up the shipping team from getting packages out the door. 

“Descartes XPS has been instrumental in helping us scale rapidly from a home business to $5 million in annual revenue. We can easily handle massive volume spikes without any bottlenecks or additional burden on our ecommerce website. Plus, rate shopping during checkout caters to our customers’ diverse shipping expectations—and keeps them coming back for repeat orders—while Descartes’ discounted rates and efficiency gains help us curb our shipping and labor costs.” 

- Jim Reding, CEO, Aroma Retail 

Founded in 2017, Aroma Retail is an Environmental Scenting Company offering the same type of diffusers and pure-grade fragrance oils that resorts use. Expanding from a home-based business to a 13,000-sq-ft facility, the Green-Certified and Women-Owned enterprise ships aroma diffusion machines, room sprays, reed diffusers, and other scented products around the world via its website and Las Vegas-based retail location, Smelly Bar. 

Integrated with Shopify, Descartes XPS simplifies and accelerates the ecommerce vendor’s shipping process, while empowering customers with carrier rate comparison during checkout and email order updates.  

“Descartes XPS has been with us from the early days when we were shipping less than 10 orders per day, offering phenomenal customer support. Without any hiccups, it’s scaled with us as we’ve grown—easily supporting us during, for example, Black Friday/Cyber Monday when we now typically experience a $300K spike in business or when we processed $250K of orders in one hour after being featured on Good Morning America!” said Jim Reding, CEO at Aroma Retail.  

Live quoting enables Aroma Retail to offer its customers shipping choices during the checkout process. “The biggest benefit is that domestic and international customers can ship via the method they’re most comfortable with, whether that’s the post office, FedEx, or another carrier,” explained Sloane Suarez, Operations Manager at Aroma Retail. “Plus, for fragrance oil refill orders, we offer customers free shipping; Descartes XPS gives us the option to rate shop ourselves to find the most competitive rate.” 

Leveraging high-performance capabilities—batch label creation, integrated scale, destination-based rules, searchable shipping history, a single dashboard with order details in one place, ecommerce shipping cost threshold alerts—Aroma Retail increased the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of shipping.  

“Product weights are pre-input to expedite the process and eliminate guesswork for the team. And with customer data seamlessly migrated over from our website, the system verifies addresses to fix any errors, saving time, reducing stress, and helping us ship faster and provide better customer service,” said Suarez. “Training new people is also fast and straightforward because the robust user interface is so simple and easily integrated into whatever web platform we need.”  

With Descartes’ pre-negotiated discounted rates with major carriers, Aroma Retail saves up to 89% on domestic and international shipping costs. For its free shipping options for customers, live quoting enables the retailer to easily compare shipping rates to get the best deal every time.

With Descartes XPS, Aroma Retail ships orders quickly and accurately, regardless of order volume, to ensure customers get the right order every time. Real-time tracking data helps the shipping team keep customers apprised of the order journey via email updates. 

With seamless order import, batch label printing, and automated rate shopping, Descartes XPS helped the company scale order volume from <10 orders/day to 200–300 orders daily. Plus, scale integration automatically populates package weights to save time and effort.

Highly-responsive, live customer support from the Descartes team from day one—from small side gig to a thriving ecommerce business—ensures Aroma Retail has access to resources and expertise as needed to continue to grow without any operational headaches.