eHub
An Emerging One-Stop-Shop for eCommerce Shipping Needs

Drawing insights from over a decade of experience, eHub offers eCommerce businesses and fulfillment alike a holistic API shipping solution that is affordable and dynamic. The eponymous platform presents multiple advantages for its users, including the ability to integrate with over 200 carriers and platforms. The company also offers post-in stallation support for its clients. Today, eHub has established itself as one of the most sought-after API solution providers in the eCommerce space.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Colton Burgon, VP of Sales at eHub, shared his valuable insights on how the eHub API enables clients to scale shipping processes and unlock exceptional growth.

Could you walk us through your clients’ challenges and how eHub is helping them overcome those pain points?

The supply chain disruption induced by the pandemic has heavily impacted the shipping industry, sky-rocketing already high prices. As such, eCommerce businesses are looking for API solutions like eHub to help them circumvent the complex nuances of the current shipping scenario. Our solution allows clients to leverage our cheaper shipping rates. This enables them to be more competitive in the marketplace or use that saving as an additional revenue stream. We have partnerships with many shipping carriers and platforms.

Another challenge is platform back-end maintenance after integrations with shopping carts and carriers. But our clients are rid of this concern as they only have to code once for eHub, and then eHub maintains all of those integrations for them on the back end. For instance, if Shopify changes how APIs work in their platform, our clients don’t need to make any changes to the coding. We handle it. This allows them to focus their developmental resources on the highest value areas rather than wasting time maintaining hundreds of ongoing integrations.

What is the value proposition that you bring to the table?

At the core, our company itself is an API. Clients can access our shipping platform through the API to print their shipping labels.

The value to end-users is that it gives them freedom to select whatever platform is going to meet their needs best. And for technology platforms utilizing the API, it gets them instant access to hundreds of integrations with shopping carts, marketplaces, and shipping carriers. Both can take advantage of the cost savings that come from the lower rates eHub delivers because of our exceptional volume.

Even when clients have an in-house proprietary platform, our API can still integrate with it and our team of engineers will help them with any work that needs to be done on their side. From a scalability perspective eHub enables hundreds of different integrations. We receive over a million API calls daily and generate over 350,000 labels daily around the world.

API uptime is over three nines - 99.9 percent uptime. Additionally, we provide analytics and reports to both clients and end-users about their shipping as everything goes through our database. It helps them identify places where they can reduce additional spending on an ongoing basis.

Our philosophy is to do whatever benefits the client and enables them to grow. The nice thing about the way we operate is we make money when the customer ships and prints more labels. Our solution is 100% in alignment with clients’ growth goals and aspirations.

Please give us an account of how you engage with the clients?

We have a tailored onboarding process for different needs of clients. If a customer wants to integrate to the API and custom code it themselves, that’s great. On the other hand if the client needs to do something more exotic, we can lend our resources and help the client and get the client up and running in the shortest amount of time possible. Straightforward integrations can be done in as short as a day. For example, a well-known mobile phone carrier was able to develop the integration with the help of our team in just 26 hours. More complex integrations that require extensive work can be accomplished in three to four weeks with the help of our team.

Post integration, we offer a complete testing environment for our clients with the full speed of our production servers. This gives them the best understanding of how the eHub API is going to perform for them in a live production environment. Our resources include a large support team to help the clients get back on track in the event of any challenge or unexpected issues. Support is delivered in-person, live remote, via phone, email and chat.

Would you like to share with us any client success story to substantiate your value propositions?

One of our Canadian clients, Techdinamics, operates a shipping platform used by many very large warehouses. They wanted to do multiple integrations in hopes of getting access to more carriers and services within those carriers, and they were looking to add an income stream as well. Their platform is an enterprise-size system. They predominantly cater to the distributors for fortune 500 companies in the third-party logistics (3PL) space. We stepped in and did all the API integrations within two weeks and then set their system in a day. In addition, to all the new carriers and services they were seeking, they are also benefitting from significant additional income through the revenue. Our company typically engages in a rev share with tech platforms, which are negotiated on a per-client basis.

How do you discern yourself among the several other competitors in this space?

From a savings perspective we have unique contracts with all the major carriers and that allows us to start delivering value immediately after clients start leveraging the API. On the API side, there is no other API that end-users and tech platforms can integrate with that delivers more integrations and access to carriers. Additionally, we don’t bind our clients with contracts, unlike the other players in this space. Clients using eHub can quit anytime, but hardly anyone chooses to opt out because of our client-centered service and commitment speak for themselves.

Apart from your API solution, what other services does eHub offer?

In addition to our API services, we also help tech platform clients with their websites. For instance, some clients are skilled at developing shipping and warehouse management software, but they may not have enough expertise or bandwidth for user engagement and automation via their website. In such cases, we offer tools they can white label to onboard their users. It allows them to let users sign up to their platform via their website. Then on the back-end all of the technical work to set up meters, accounts, etc. by us. We’ve automated the whole onboarding process for them.

For tech platforms and rev share partners we collaborate on marketing. This includes SEO in paid search, content creating, running co-branded webinars, and more. Again, anything that helps clients grow is on the table. We love getting creative. All this ties back to our mission statement, which is to be client-centric in all our endeavors.