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Shipium is proving to be an idea that ecommerce companies want. Due to the explosion of ecommerce over the last year, it's proving to be an idea they need, too.

Ecommerce operators have a bad habit of falling into "supply-side" thinking. Forecasting demand has been figured out by someone else, they think, with merchandise ordered and ready to be placed into fulfillment centers. Their job then becomes a linear planning exercise going from start to finish in increasingly smaller units. The merchandise goes from container to truck to pallet to box to door step. This is push-based thinking. It's the idea that the job is efficiently and effectively pushing the flow of goods from beginning to end. One of the most powerful ideas both Amazon and Zulily adopted was the idea of pull-based supply chain thinking. Start from the end goal, and work backwards. Efficient and effective planning in reverse order is where actual stepwise optimizations can be found.

Sometimes it seems like the behemoths of Amazon and Walmart are using black magic to promote free and fast shipping. But it's not magic. It's mostly sophisticated software combined with learned principles.

Traditional ecommerce customer experience priorities, like browsing products or talking to customer service, don’t include the idea of delivery experience. The notion of delivery being a part of the buying experience was conceptual but never real because it was hard to measure, which meant it was hard to improve, which meant it was hard to market to customers. So why care about it?