About the Brand:

Carnivero is an online store which sells very unique and rare carnivorous plants. It has a very wide offering of all kinds of Aroids, tropical and other carnivorous plants.

Problem Statement: 

Since many of these carnivorous plants are not native to the weather condition in most USA cities, the plants require very precise packaging that protects them from extreme temperatures. Since transit time is known from historical data for each shipping method and weather forecast can be acquired using openweather api’s. It is possible to determine the protective packaging required for every shipment. Since protective packaging is expensive, it needs to be used in an optimal manner.

Issues:  There are a lot of variables determining what sort of packaging is to be used for every order. Delivery Zipcode, Weather forecast at the delivery Zipcode, plant type in the order, order amount(should the extra packaging be free or the customer is to be charged extra), Shipping method used, etc.

What we Did?

We decided to create a Google Sheet, which would act as an admin setting panel. The sheet would hold settings for 1>Transit Time for Every Shipping method 2>Temperature and packaging rules for every plant type(using product tags) 3>A logs sheet, where the processing logs can be stored and can be reviewed 4>Hold Logic settings: essentially to optimize the cost of packaging, a hold logic was created, where in case the forecast after x days was such that no additional packaging is required, the order would be held for x days.

We created an application which would run everyday and process all unfulfilled order one at a time and using the settings in the google sheet would tag each order with the relevant tags(from settings) for the required packaging.

Result:

Using Shopify API’s we were albe to help the brand in reducing the no of plants which died or arrival or became unhealthy, greatly improving the customer experience and reducing the carbon footprint as no. of reship orders got reduced. Using weather forecast to hold certain shipments for n numner of days, we were albe to help the brand in cutting down its packaging cost