About:
Nvio Store is an online-only store that started to highlight purpose-driven brands and their unique products. It was created during the global pandemic as Matagora’s original pop-up shop facilitator concept had to be completely halted. Nvio Store began by connecting with brand partners that were already a part of the Matagora platform. It quickly became a diverse marketplace featuring brands from North America to Israel. The core of our business is product curation; we need to remain fully focused on picking unique and compelling products. This is what keeps our customers coming back again and again. We realize that a successful store starts with a unique and ever-changing array of products, so our goal is to provide the best.
Challenges:
In the process of adding new brands and products to our store at a rapid pace, we quickly realized how cumbersome and manual the process was. Something we thought would take us hours, ended up taking weeks. This started to hurt us in other ways, as we had to divert our attention away from marketing and customer service efforts to focus on the tedious, time-consuming process of adding new products to the store. After having done the work of hand picking the right brands to highlight in our store, we then realized not every brand was able to work with us on a dropship basis. It also didn’t make sense for us to commit to wholesale arrangements with each brand partner, at least not in the early stages of our partnership. Sadly we had to put some partnerships to the side until we are in a place where we can determine a level of market fit.
Assuming our brand partners could work with us on a dropship basis, we also found that the workflow was incredibly difficult to organize. We had to remember the margin per brand (or even per product in some cases) and remember who to contact every time an order came in. Then, keep track of different payment terms with each partner. It quickly became overwhelming for us to easily keep an eye on our operating margins, as our invoices were all over the place. To make matters worse we had no idea whether or not our brand partners would have inventory to fulfill our orders. We had our fingers crossed and hoped we wouldn’t have to explain to a customer that they had actually purchased a sold out product. Unsurprisingly, there were a number of occasions when the worst happened and we inadvertently sold out-of-stock goods. This seriously affected our customers’ experiences and led to a souring of our reputation which hurt our sales in the short and long term.
How the solution helped:
We felt the pain of running a Shopify store on a dropship basis, which has become the new norm for today’s sought-after retailers, and decided to do something about it. We created the product importing, real-time inventory syncing, and order relaying app ourselves. We knew right away that it would be saving us a lot of money, stress, and time, while helping us push more sales by facilitating the brand onboarding flow and overall dropship process.
With the Matagora app, we were able to automate our whole manual workflow, effectively saving us an average of at least 10 hours a week. This allowed us to focus more on growth initiatives and continue to secure new curated brand partnerships without having to worry about all the manual onboarding and management of those relationships. The process of adding a new brand and their suite of products was taking us an average of 20 hours; we gained all that time back with the click of a button. Regaining that time has allowed us to focus on curating more amazing products while having more time for growth initiatives and for providing an outstanding customer experience. Most of the other similar solutions on the market charge monthly fees that increase with the number of products you sync with. You have to pay a premium for their syncing tools, but cannot even track your orders and fulfillment on the same platform. Matagora only charges when actual sales are made, instead of charging ever-increasing monthly fees.
Results:
As an independent store, much of our competitiveness stems from speed; speed on handpicking and onboarding new brands at a steady pace, in addition to always being familiar with new and relevant trends. Using the Matagora app allowed us to 10X our speed and unlock valuable time to stay ahead of our competitors. We’ve seen a manual process of 20 hours per new brand brought down to a minute. Our margins have increased, just by being able to easily monitor our revenue rate per product sold. We cannot even put a number value on our team being more excited to spend time on creative initiatives rather than tedious product onboarding and overwhelming order management. Our sales increased by being able to further increase the lifetime value of our customers, and our traffic, dwell time, IG reach and newsletter open rates increased by people wanting to stay in the loop for the next exciting drops. Overall Matagora simplified the stressful task of running an online store and has allowed Nvio to function without any unnecessary labor.
As the creators of Matagora, we know we are not entirely unbiased. However, we’ve seen first hand how our solution can make retailers’ lives easier. We couldn’t sell you something we wouldn’t use ourselves.
Sign up today to see how Matagora can simplify your independent retail business.
