Launch HN: Convictional (YC W19) – Supplier Network for Retailers
We’re Roger and Chris, co-founders of Convictional (https://www.convictional.com/). Convictional makes it possible for online retailers to find, onboard, and integrate with third-party suppliers. We do this by connecting them to a network of suppliers that manage the inventory and ship those products directly to the end consumer on their behalf.
The idea behind Convictional started when Roger worked at GNC, a large natural health products retailer, at the age of 17. One of the biggest challenges was onboarding. As a retailer, you either buy inventory or ship from third parties ("drop shipping"). They decided to expand their catalog by selling some products that were shipped directly by the supplier. To do this, GNC required both sides to implement EDI (an old school, pre-internet data format for exchanging information between business systems) or manually exchange flat files for things like inventory, orders, and product information. We only got a fraction of the total vendors we wanted to onboarded because of this.
A few years later, we met while working together at Shopify on B2B. There, we saw that the challenge of onboarding third-party brands still existed for retailers, and people were experiencing the same pain trying to use EDI to get it done. Online retailers also didn’t know how to find third-party brands to work with or struggled to dropship with existing partners.
Convictional’s product is an app and API that syncs product information, inventory, orders, fulfillments, and payouts between online retailers and all of their suppliers. We do this by integrating with the systems used on both sides through an API or pre-built connectors to ecommerce platforms like Shopify. We later added a way to find suppliers after online retailers told us that they also wanted to access a network of connected third-party brands.
We’re using a generalized data model in the middle with a bunch of mapping, transformation and transmission steps on each side. Similar to what EDI does but much easier to set up. The goal is to turn what today requires a 6 month IT project into an email invite and an app install. It’s an industry that has existed since the 60s, and it’s probably the last major software industry that touches commerce but has not meaningfully been updated.
To do this we developed our own queueing system in Go that can map events from buyers and sellers, transform them from the source format into the destination format, validate and apply a bunch of domain-specific business logic to make sure what crosses the bounds of buyers and sellers actually makes sense, and then send those into another queue that passes it to their partner. We basically have to control the state of three systems for each transaction. Before us, it could take up to 24 hours to know whether that loop succeeded or not but we’re able to do it within a few seconds. There are a lot of real life things that enables, but mostly it enables a good experience for the buyer’s ultimate consumers and less inventory for both sides.
Our belief is that online retailers will be less inclined to take on inventory. That’s why we started by building the tooling necessary to automate dropship. Over time, we’ll launch tools that can enable more forms of B2B trade in a way where regardless of IT skills, both sides can have systems doing their purchasing and selling for them. Today large companies enjoy significant advantages through this integrated approach, and soon every buyer and seller can too.
Brands and suppliers can join our seller network for free. If you make or sell physical products on an ecommerce platform, consider joining. For online retailers, we charge a flat monthly fee and a percentage of GMV, depending on volume and which work gets outsourced to us.
If you have questions, we’ll be here to answer them. We’d love any feedback, ideas, and/or EDI horror stories that you may have as well. Thank you!
51 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 95.9 ms ] thread1. Accurate product listings
2. <24 hour ship times, enforced
3. No manual steps, only automated / integrated
4. Easy returns, funded by sellers
5. Sellers based in the same country
Drop ship can range from very small and generally not very durable online retailers to massive and very sophisticated retailers. In the case of the sophisticated ones, you may not even know the difference. Amazon for example has been drop shipping a lot more, but because of their vendor SLA people can't tell it's not from FBA. It's mostly just about good vendor SLAs, local suppliers and short ship times.
The other thing we're seeing is a continuum where people start out drop shipping, and then move to wholesale when the volume grows. That way 1. Consumers get access to smaller / newer brands early and then 2. Eventually the experience gets more controlled. We do both, just generally because our customers are growing but also because you really need both to make the experience good.
Would it be fair to say Convictional operates in a similar domain as https://supplier.meesho.com does in India? If not, what are the differences?
Is EDI specific to North America or a global phenomenon?
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The hamburger-menu doesn't work when I block google-analytics and hs-scripts domains.
The links in the footer viz Retailers -> Marketplace Platform and Brands & Suppliers -> Brands simply load the homepage. Is that intentional?
Personally, I believe Convictional connects online retailers to brands. Focus on selling, let brands handle fulfillment. is wayy better than the abstract Become the Digital Destination for all of your customer needs without inventory risk.
Another nit-pick is that the entire page is all about retailers, but the top section has a link to Solution for Brands and it isn't clear really why the link exists top-of-the-fold when the entire page has no copy re Brands? That, or I hopelessly misread the copy.
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All the best!
Meesho is interesting. It's like an ecommerce store in a box.
We aren't a conventional marketplace ourselves and we integrate with the systems that both the sellers and buyers are using. On the network side, we make introductions to buyers and sellers in our network rather than listing products from sellers on a mass marketplace (like AliExpress). We basically vet each retailer to see which suppliers in our network would make sense for them then make introductions if there's a fit. We also tend to be focused on larger retailers and distributors rather than people who are just getting started in ecommerce.
Thanks for the feedback on the site. Will fix the hamburger menu too. Good catch.
I like your copy suggestion. It makes sense for people who might be new to dropship. The "digital destination" line came from larger retailers we talked to that wanted to expand their existing product catalog, so we aimed that at them. They tend to already do dropship today with larger suppliers, but they struggle with onboarding smaller ones. The thought of having a wider assortment of products is usually what initially piques their interest. That starts a conversation around new tools that they could use.
Congratulations on the launch and best of luck for the road ahead!
Not sure if this is the correct place, but I do design :P
Have you thought about creating retailer plans for hobbyists/new entrepreneurs who want to just test a few ads/products on fb, then signup for bigger plans later on, or maybe a freemium/pay-per-sale model?
I ask as a developer, who's thought about doing dropship quite a bit (whenever I get dev burnout), original plan was buy shopify account, onboard products from oberlo, and get some product vids up on fb ads for the cooler products.
* Quick idea, you guys should buy a warehouse, stick it in the middle of Odgan Kansas, and charge suppliers to store their stuff there, than ship it for them. With that location you can send almost anything to almost anywhere in the US in 2 days on ground as long as you get it out quickly, and you directly inject it into the carriers hub.
I'm actually working on an open-source fulfillment system for Shopify where users can source their inventory from ShipBob, Deliverr, any custom 3PL:
https://github.com/openshiporg/openship
Could we integrate with Convictional?
Our general feeling is that niche / values based aggregators are where the puck is going, as opposed to everyone being a worse version of Amazon, where people are shopping their values more often.
The other thing I would say, not to pick on any one of those offerings, is that we actually have a bunch of prebuilt seller apps to making onboarding easier. To our knowledge, that's unique, most of them just have an API and CSVs where as part of our product includes the seller side integration. Merely offering an API instead of EDI doesn't necessarily solve the problem, most of the sellers don't have ERPs or in-house IT at all so facing down JSON via API instead of X12 via EDI is equally impossible for them.
* Fill time: time from posting the order to the seller until they ship it as verified by their carrier integration
* Ship time: time from order being placed until ship time
* Complete time: time from order placement to notification of shipment on the consumer side
As time has gone on, we can tell who ships reliably and put those sellers in front of other buyers, etc. So eventually the data we have gives us and buyers and indication of how well vendors are adhering to SLAs around shipping times. Often the expectation is 24 hours, so it's not hard to red/yellow/green people into buckets and manage the buckets. Eventually we can offer our own SLAs for sellers we put in front of buyers but for now we're just gathering data and providing reporting.
Edit: to answer your question directly, we don't currently integrate with them. Generally speaking we can get the same data from the platform we integrate with, so it saves us from having to build N more integrations, but I agree the closer we can get to ground truth the better for vendor SLA.
I like what I see so far from Convictional. But one thing that puzzles me with similar start-ups is the disregard for actual operations. Has nothing to do with Convictional so. But since I see that as an opportunity I put my money where my mouth is.
What’s the story behind it?
I have read your landing pages but still not understanding how you are going to make leaps and bounds ahead of competition trying to add “selection”...
I see your biggest challenge is onboarding suppliers that are non-tech or don’t understand eCommerce platforms.
Otherwise you’re onboarding brands that are already listing their products with other dropshippers?
I run an a consulting agency for Amazon suppliers, essentially holding their hand through all things related to Amazon and eCommerce strategy.
I also run a marketplace store for when my brands don’t want to have their own Amazon relationship.
We haven’t pushed any brands to oberlo because it seems like a massive headache with low sales opportunity.
Who is your “perfect” brand?
Generally we can help them with a lot more than enable drop ship, which could be underwriting their receivables, doing EDI integration, setting up a B2B program, etc.
It's less focused on marketplace sellers and more directly on the company that sources or makes it. Hope this helps.
The advantages for the retailers seems great but what about advantages for the suppliers? Eventually if enough people started using one supplier, they would have so much inventory they would need another warehouse.
For the suppliers, they're often being asked to participate in lots of different flavors of "vendor enablement" program. Most are oppressive, involve EDI integration, 40 page vendor agreements and opaque invoicing. We're trying to get rid of those things, and ideally give them a way to have one integration for all of this stuff.