UnBoxed with Chris Hondl
and Jordan Lindberg

From Cart to Customer: Streamlining E-Commerce Shipping, Software Integrations and Inventory Management at Scale

In this episode of UnBoxed, Deb Menter sits down with Chris Hondl (Finale Inventory) and Jordan Lindberg (Stardust Memorials) to explore how growing e-commerce brands navigate complexity—and why tech agility is essential. From shipping surges to omnichannel inventory, they break down what it takes to scale without burning out your team.

Jordan shares how Finale’s inventory management software supports his high-volume, multi-channel business and how it integrates into his larger tech stack, while Chris explains how applying different software at different times in your growth cycle can help build an agile business.

Key Takeaways:

• Tame the Data Firehose: Filter out noise and focus on actionable insights.
• Stay Flexible With System Integrations: As businesses scale, they need to do so without rigid infrastructure, handling sudden shipping surges and complex order flows with ease.
• Streamline Fulfillment: Integrate picking, packing, and label generation into one seamless flow.
• Own Every Channel: Allocate inventory across marketplaces and prevent overselling.
• Empower Your Customers and Customer Service: Real-time order and shipping updates keep support teams and your customers informed.

Guest speakers:

Chris Hondl, Co-Founder & CTO, Finale Inventory
Chris Hondl is the co-founder and CTO of Finale Inventory. Prior to Finale, Chris had senior technology leadership roles at Core Mobility, IMVU, and Adobe Systems. Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and insight into the world of technology, inventory management, logistics, and accounting.

Jordan Lindberg, President & Founder, Stardust Memorials
Jordan Lindberg is the founder of Stardust Memorials, a retailer, wholesaler, and contract manufacturer of cremation urns and other memorialization products. He is also a partner at eFulfillment Service, a leading provider of logistics and fulfillment services for small and medium-sized independent eCommerce retailers. Prior to his 20 years in digital commerce, he was a philosophy professor at Central Michigan University. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Missouri–Columbia.

Host: Deb Menter, Pitney Bowes
Deb is on the Client Lifecycle Team at Pitney Bowes, where she helps clients navigate complex rate changes, mailing system migrations, and greater shipping savings and value. You’ll also find her moderating Pitney Bowes webinars, where she addresses common client concerns and provides actionable solutions.

The material, opinions, and information presented in the podcast are for general information purposes only and is not professional advice. Listeners should consult appropriate professionals for specific advice tailored to your situation. The podcast and its content is provided as-is and any use is at the listener’s own risk. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests or hosts are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of any company.

The material, opinions, and information presented in the podcast are for general information purposes only and is not professional advice. Listeners should consult appropriate professionals for specific advice tailored to your situation. The podcast and its content is provided as-is and any use is at the listener’s own risk. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests or hosts are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of any company.

Deb Menter
Hi everyone and welcome to UnBoxed presented by Pitney Bowes. We're your source for all things shipping. I'm your host Deb Menter and I'm here today with Chris Hondl, Co-Founder and CTO of Finale Inventory, as well as Jordan Lindberg, President and Founder of Stardust Memorials.

Thanks for joining me today. I'm really excited to dive into this chat today because it's a really unique panel. We have two founders with us and ah Jordan happens to be a user of Finale's inventory management software. So, we're going to get some really great perspective on both the creation of software like this, as well as the use of this kind of application.

So not just how this filled a gap for sellers like Stardust, how Finale filled this gap, but also how integrations can help automate different workflows and provide transparency to the end end buyer and all the way from the order to the delivery.

So going to dive in right now and we're going to start pretty easy. I'm going to give you both, I think hopefully this a softball question, give bit of background on yourselves and your companies and how you got to where you are today. So Chris, I'm going to start with you.

Chris Hondl
Yeah, well, I've been involved in building software applications, kind of a wildly different kinds of software, everything from graphic design software at Adobe to cloud-based entertainment software, social media software, been doing it for over 30 years.

And a little over a decade ago, created some software with a partner of mine for, believe it or not, designing fireworks shows like you'd see on the 4th of July.
And that was pretty exciting and you know didn't really think of this as a big business. But what happened is as we started working with the companies that put on those shows, they said, hey, inventory, you know, this design sounds important, but inventory, bringing product, you know, bringing product into the country, warehousing it, repackaging it, and bring it into the customer site was a huge part of their business.

And there just wasn't good software. And so we created an inventory product initially for those customers. And then a little over a decade ago, ah discovered that e-commerce was exploding and started doing e-commerce inventory management and transitioned into doing that with a focus for the last 10 years. And so that has been a heck of a ride watching different platforms come and go. But you know, one of the things that always stays the same is companies have to keep track of their stuff. And that's what we do.

Deb Menter
Yeah, I love that transition from the fireworks to where you are today. It's so interesting. So Jordan, yeah, let's ah move over to you. Give us a little bit about your background.

Jordan Lindberg
So it's completely different than Chris. I didn't come at it through software exactly. So this is going to seem really nuts, but I have a PhD in philosophy. I was a college philosophy professor for a long time, which has nothing to do with with any of this, but goes to show how people with really unusual backgrounds find their way into e-commerce.

I was like a lot of you know professors, I guess, particularly young professors starting right out of graduate school. I was sort of starving to death. And I actually got into e-commerce by first becoming a power seller on, on eBay and selling stuff on eBay. And I, you know, i I think a lot of people in e-commerce got their start in places like that. I did, this was a lot of years ago now, but I, that's, that was my introduction to, to this.

And it was a, it was a way to kind of supplement my income and like skills that i developed really in an academic environment, which had to do really more with organization and logic and and thinking through through problems in certain kinds of ways and and so taking that skill set and applying it to this emerging thing, which we now think of as digital commerce.

From there, about then a whole bunch of other crazy stuff happened. My family got in got in the warehousing and logistics business. I'm a partner at eFulfillment Service. I started with that project 20 years ago.

And work with my father and my two brothers in that to this day. Within that, then i I ended up spinning up some e-commerce companies, and including the the one i guess we're talking about today, is Stardust Memorials, which is a brand, part of a sort of a collection of companies that are in the funeral product space.

And I've, and I've been doing that, but, so I, I have a pretty eclectic background. I have this sort of weird academic background. and then I have this warehousing logistics, fulfillment, 3PL background.

And then I have this very hands-on digital commerce background ah by the way, you, eFulfillment services, I say, is owned by family. So is Stardust Memorials. I'm a 50/50 partner with my wife and we live in Northwest Lower Michigan, which is a really beautiful part of the world. And I have the ability to, to work on things that have a kind of a national or even an international scope, which i which I enjoy, but I get to do it from a really beautiful ah corner of the country at the same time.

Deb Menter
So with both of you being founders, I think this is so interesting because you both talked about really trying to fill some kind of market gap, especially as e-commerce started blowing up. And I've had this conversation with some of my other podcast guests as well, that, you know, 20 years ago, people were not...
Maybe they weren't even encouraged to really build an e-commerce site because no one was sure how it was going to go. the fact that you guys have both plugged into that from an early stage is really interesting.

So can you, I'd love to talk to you a little bit about that kind of being a founder and then watching it grow and watching your business scale and how you account for that. Like what kind of thinking about the problems you can solve and maybe some of the challenges that are keeping you up at night.
So Jordan, can you give some advice?

Jordan Lindberg
Sure. sure you know I've had this experience and i and I'm sure Chris has as well. Well, yeah know I know he has. He was just referring to the fact that he's done, you know he's worn a lot of hats and been involved in lots of different software projects.

I've been involved in lots of companies in different stages of growth. As far as Stardust Memorials is concerned, we're really kind of a disruptive force in the in the in the funeral industry because what we make possible, we make it possible for people to to purchase funeral products directly from a website rather than through ah through a traditional venue like a funeral home.

And that is that's the disruptive aspect of what we do. And the funeral industry is an old industry. It's one of those things that's been around for a long, long time. It hasn't changed very much. As a kind of, as an entrepreneur, I kind of look for those scenarios of industries that are older established, haven't undergone a digital transformation or a tech transformation or any kind of sort of evolution in the way that, that other industries have.

And I look at those as opportunities. We got involved in that industry in a very deliberate way to be a disruptive force. And I think digital commerce as ah as a field and the people who sort of trade in it are oftentimes people who are very comfortable being disruptors in in that way. it's not like I like going in breaking things all the time. It's not like I get up every day trying to figure out what can I break, but there's something to be said for looking at industries that haven't gone through transformation and asking questions about why hasn't that happened and what could be done to do.

There's opportunity there, opportunity for folks to build businesses and in markets like that, I think. There's a lot of opportunities still in the funeral space, frankly.

Deb Menter
But Chris, how do you feel about breaking get waking up and breaking things and being a disruptor in the market?

Chris Hondl
It's been a really interesting time, I think, in software in the last 10 years. And this this corner of the industry in software is like, you know, software eats the world is a saying, right? And there's a little bit software everywhere, but you know, there's two things that we're, we've been riding over the last decade, right?

One is the transition from on-premises software to cloud, cloud-based software, that and SaaS, you know, that was already starting to happen in the early 2010s, but it just, you know, it just kept going. And, you know, we were there early, you know, the early versions of what became Finale Inventory, you know, go date all the way back to 2011. So fairly early in that migration. And of course, the second thing, the second side is, of course, the disruption of retail with e-commerce. If you go back 15 years ago, e-commerce was absolutely a thing. Amazon was huge. eBay was huge.

But as a percentage of the overall, you know, retail business, it was much smaller than it is today. And seeing the shifts from how you approach, ah do you have your own website or your marketplaces, which marketplaces are leading, how you do fulfillment, how you handle operations.

How do you mix retail and e-commerce in the same business, which a lot of our customers do? And so kind of riding both of those to a pretty interesting place where now I think many things kind of COVID was a big, of course, accelerant.
Things have gotten a little bit static, but I think we're on the precipice of really big change here with AI. We're seeing you know initial signs just in our own business in terms of how customers discover our software, and I'm sure that that's also happening in consumer products. And so that's, I think, pretty exciting to see how that latest set of disruptions happen. And as then as a founder and as small business owner, how do we kind of meet the need as quickly as we can, you know, taking advantage of the fact of the agility that comes by being a small business ourselves.

Deb Menter
When we talk about you know small and medium-sized businesses and this boom of e-commerce, yeah that agility is so important. And so many people are facing that. And how do you scale? And how do you make sure that you have all the right pieces in place as those changes come about? And how do you predict those changes, which is almost impossible?

But I think it's really fascinating. So this is really for me and anyone listening who maybe isn't an expert in what the two of you do. But I'm going to ask you, is there a difference between inventory management and warehouse management software? Are they two different types of software? Do they go hand in hand?

Chris Hondl
Yeah, you know it's very it's kind of really interesting because there are subtleties and there's you know you start getting into some even more adjacent spaces, but sticking to warehouse management software, and inventory management software. Warehouse management really focuses, as it says, on the warehouse. And so it's typically going to be really focused on picking and packing operations, receiving operations, integrating with shipping software if it doesn't have a kind of a shipping component built in.

And often these days it will have integration with e-commerce, but it typically doesn't have broader scope, right? So, it doesn't have updating stock levels back to marketplaces, figuring out what stock levels you want to have and in the many disparate marketplaces, any type of even some kind of order routing capability, financial components, planning components, reordering components.

Inventory management tends to be a broader scope, but not as deep. A lot of WMS systems are very deep in the warehouse. Inventory management tends to be broader. The key vendors in the space tend to have a ah set of capabilities around purchasing and reordering.

Often capabilities in terms of you know some amount of forecasting, capabilities in warehouse management, and then of course capabilities for integration with e-commerce marketplaces. So kind of that breadth of functionality and usually a pretty strong financial component as well.

Deb Menter
Got it. Tends to a bit broader capabilities and maybe not as deep in the warehouse specifically. So it's sort of this like, in my brain, it went to a T-shape. Inventory management is here and then warehouse management kind of goes deeper into the warehouse.

Chris Hondl
I think that's you know that i think is where the market has kind of evolved and that's certainly what we see. There are, again, inventory management is a little undefined. There are companies that talk about inventory management and they have very different set of capabilities. It's always important to think about yeah within that umbrella term, like, okay, what are the specific capabilities that you know any particular piece of any particular system is actually able to provide?

Deb Menter
Mm-hmm. Got it. And so Jordan, from your side, I know you leverage Finale. Do you also do have that hand in hand with a warehouse management tool, with a shipping tool, with other tools like that?

Jordan Lindberg
Yeah you know, most e-commerce folks, and we're certainly in the mainstream with this, are chaining together lots and lots of products that do different things and to create what we generally refer to as a tech stack.

And a tech stack is made up of all kinds of layers of pieces of software that are doing different work. Ideally, you're doing it in an integrated way. This is a big challenge that folks like Chris have it actually yeah in his business is figuring out how to come up with kind of seamless integration relationships with other tools that are doing other kinds of things. So work we're not different in that in that way of operating out of a stack of technology, which includes ah an e-commerce system. It includes a ah shipping ah system. It includes an accounting system.

All of which are industry packages of functionality that that need to work with another with another tool. So to go back to your issue about inventory management software versus warehouse management software, and Chris did an excellent job of explaining that distinction, I think, and I it's certainly my view of it as well. But though those are, again, they're like slices in this complicated ah cake that everybody's operating out of made up of all these different components.

I'll also say that it seems if you interview a hundred e-commerce entrepreneurs, they'll have a hundred different tech stacks. There's the better common and elements between all of them, but no two tech stacks will look exactly the same. They're always mixed up messes of all this different software partners are working with.

Deb Menter
Yeah. I mean, that makes sense too, based on like what business you're in and what you're supplying. And I know, Chris, you mentioned having both a retail and an e-commerce space. And do you have both? Do you not have both?

Chris Hondl
Each business is a little different. And so the capabilities that important, the kind of the mix of capabilities that they're looking for ends up being a little different.

And that results in different tech stacks and different software that's better for each company. We actually feel pretty good about what we do, but there's a lot of folks that have slightly different needs and maybe we're not a good fit for. 

Deb Menter
So as it comes to the integration, we're going to move on to our ship kind of dive into this shipping conversation. And I know ah Finale has an integration with a shipping software and Jordan, you're user of that integration, which is amazing. But can you talk a little bit about that kind of integration?

Chris Hondl
Yeah, there's really two things, you know, to think about, kind of why do we end up in this situation where, you know, to Jordan's point that, you're getting tech stacks with different software that are connected together. And there's, you know, there's that depth of functionality.

And there's also about, you know, there's another aspect of when do companies typically come across the need for a certain software? So shipping software is often something that happens early in the journey. You start selling online and get in a situation fairly early where you're looking for that dedicated shipping software often earlier before, then you would need a warehouse management or inventory management system.

And then as your company grows, what we see is typically the kind of chaos that's in. There's too many spreadsheets, there's too many orders going out every month, there's too many purchase orders being placed every month.
There's a desire to open up on more marketplaces, maybe open a like separate fulfillment centers, maybe to bring retail into the mix, into what was formerly an e-commerce only business. And as that complexity arises, that drives the need for systems, so you know, like Finale that kind of can wrestle that the complexity to the ground and give you the foundation.

You know, inventory management is a complex space, but so is shipping. Shipping's got a lot of issues around payments, around carry integrations, around ah different rate cards, different, you know different specific needs if you're shipping internationally or shipping hazardous materials.

And so, you know, you get in a situation where having that kind of best of breed software becomes important.

Deb Menter
Can you talk about how you've leveraged this type of software and integration to automate your workflows?

Jordan Lindberg
Yeah, sure. And I think Chris is absolutely right that one of the early decisions in terms of the tech stack that that you end up ultimately developing comes down to finding a shipping software partner ah that's able provide you that that level of functionality. Managing orders requires, unless you're going to do it in this terribly manual way, some kind of software ah help to help you do that. And there's those different options in the marketplace. There's more than one solution that you could look to, but they all sort of work in a very similar way. So we were early to that.

Finale Inventory for us actually came along, I think we've been with Finale for two and a half or three years now. I should look that up. But you know the company's 15 years old, so we went over 10 years without a warehouse management solution in place, we doing using other tools to fill up that a need, including lots of spreadsheets.

So that that comes later. Just like Chris said, I think that the shipping software kind of comes sooner. The warehouse management portion can come later. I think another factor that drives that, by the way, and I'm sorry, I'm not answering your question exactly, but another factor that that plays into this is cost.

Doesn't cost much to get into a shipping solution. Typically, the monthly costs on that can be quite can be actually quite low. And the shipping discounts that are made available to you as a result of using it are probably big money savers anyway. So the dollars and cents, the economics around using a tool like that are easier to justify early on.

A warehouse management system can be you know quite a bit pricier and it can also deliver tremendous value that makes it very much worth paying. But you've got to find that money to kind of circle back to your question about ah moving from and a more manual process to a more automated process.
A lot of that is frankly, is fueled just by growth. You know, you can manage things, using things like spreadsheets and sticky notes to a point.

Once you start growing beyond that, things start breaking and people start breaking and processes start breaking and, vacations start getting canceled and you know, all these kinds of things that have happening that, that become signals that it's time to look at, at ways of bringing more automation in play. We grew from, you know, for a 15 year period, we went literally from, from zero to, to where we are, where we are now. And so that there was, through that process, there were lots of points at which we had to stop, take a breath and say, how can we bring some tools to bear to help us do this work that we were doing manually before.

And again, I think that's, that's probably a story that Chris could tell you with a lot of other clients of his as well.

Chris Hondl
Jordan really hits on something that we hear a lot just to echo that, which is this idea of kind of hitting your limit. When you started saying vacations canceled, people are frazzled that.

More than anything is what we see, is we see especially for the leadership team, the you know often it'll be the founder or the owner of the company, and everyone has to go to that person to find out where stuff is, when stuff's happening.

And at the growth point, you know getting an inventory system in that provides the foundation to build some real processes really unlock is a real unlock because that allows more people on the team to have access to information, more people on the team to be able to basically follow processes independently of the owner.

And that often both is either an unlock for growth or is just an unlock from the standpoint of the the business owner or the leadership team is able to go and focus on other things that they want to do and not have like not lose vacations because like they have to be there or else nothing is going to happen.

Deb Menter
Chris, I know Finale provides a ton of robust reporting and I know Jordan, you are a big user of that reporting. So I'm really interested in like, how do you find ways to continue to build value in the reports that are coming out of the software and what types of data are your clients looking for?

Chris Hondl
Yeah, you know, reporting is really interesting, right? So we started out and we built some reports that were built in it came clear really early that it was never going to be enough.

And so we invested in making it so that you could basically build pretty much, I'm not going to say any report, but a very large number of reports, either with support of our team or else as if you're more sophisticated, you can build them yourselves.

And it's in all areas, right? So information about sales, sales broken down, any particular way you might want, both the from the standpoint of what was sold, and also from the standpoint of financial impacts.

Information around things that are going on in your operations, your warehouse, stock changes, variances. If you're losing stock, being able to track that. Purchasing side, financial side. Documents, custom documents, custom labels. So basically making it so that you know any of these areas, you could basically build the reports you want. And then over time, made it so that you could get them however you need to, whether it was emailed to you on a schedule or uploaded to your Google Drive on a schedule or just go into the UI and download them.

And you know really this allows the product to fit in well with everything else that's going on. Because to Jordan's point, there's always a tech stack and there's always spreadsheets.

Deb Menter
Jordan, can you talk about a little bit a little bit about how you use this reporting, what types of things you're looking at, what type of data points you're looking at?

Jordan Lindberg
One of the things that's, it's both a blessing and a curse with e-commerce is that there's so much data being collected by automated systems all the time that you really can get buried in it. You get data, a number of visitors to your website, for example, Google Analytics type data.

You can get that kind of data all day long instantly, you know, out of out of these toolboxes that are kind of running effortlessly in the background and producing all kinds of information. So part of what makes e-commerce interesting to me actually is the data rich sort of field of battle that that we're all operating. So any tool that touches the process is picking up a kind of a recording of what's going on under it.

So Finale Inventory is a great example of this. So Finale Inventory is picking up a ton of data about the orders that are coming into the system, for example, and ah that are being processed, receiving data, purchasing data, warehouse data about movement of things within the warehouse.

Just a ton of this. And it's not, you know it's useful stuff. I mean, it's tremendously powerful stuff if you have a way to digest it. And so this is part of what makes this reporting process kind of an important part of the of the discussion, is it's it isn't that there's a lack of data.

There's actually an overwhelming amount of data. It's finding a way to present that data, the data that's really relevant to decision-making. It's getting that and then getting that data reported in a format that allows you to quickly digest that information and put it but to use.

So we use lots of tools for that. And I get accused, I think, fairly in the company of being one of these people who produces a lot of dashboards that are full of data that is but just overwhelming and maybe is actually hiding the signal in the noise.

We use Finale Inventory all the time for producing visual reports that allow us to see everything from sales data to what's going on in our receiving department to how many orders we're shipping, the status of those orders, whether they've been picked, packed, or processed.

But that's an example of the kind of data-rich environment, which we're operating and how we're interacting with it. Again, the amount of data that's available is crazy.

Deb Menter
You have to out how it all comes together and what the story is, what's really going on. What's the story?

Jordan Lindberg
Yeah, yeah. You know, and I made that remark just a second ago, you know, trying to find the signal and the noise. There's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of data and it it can be kind of overwhelming. I like Chris's remark that you know because he works with all these clients and they're all different and they're all in different places and they're the evolution of their businesses. And so what he ended up landing on a little bit was building a toolbox that allowed you to extract this data the way you needed it and extracted, but it was highly customizable.

So that you know different users could go in and basically it's not so much about coming up with more data. There's plenty of that. It's coming up with ways to extract that data and display it.

Deb Menter
Yeah, that makes sense because everyone needs to see the data in different ways. Your sales team wants to see it one way. Your customer service team wants to see it in a different way. You want to see the whole line from order to delivery and your client wants, also your end customer wants to see it in a different way.

Which brings me to my next question around, like, Jordan, what's your... What is your kind of shipping process look like from the order placing to the picking and packing?

I know you offer free shipping on all of your products. So how do you decide internally how to ship something? And you're working with like highly customized pieces. So how does that fall into your workflow? So I know it's a lengthy question, lot of meat, but I feel like.

Jordan Lindberg
Yeah, I'll try not to get lost too much in the little details because I'm not sure that they're all that relevant, but I can certainly walk through the big chunks of it. So orders originated on our website and you know customers come to the website, they pick out a product, they want to get it personalized, typically engraved.

That order gets into our e-commerce system, obviously, first. We're also gathering orders from marketplaces, Amazon is an example of this. So we have orders coming from that as well.

All of the orders, wherever they originate from, whether they come from one of our e-commerce stores or whether they come from Amazon or Etsy, they'll flow first into our, actually into our shipping software, but it's quickly handed from that to Finale Inventory.

And so Finale then gets at all of the orders, regardless of the source of the original order, whether it came from a marketplace or one of our or e-commerce stores, it ends up in Finale. So Finale is sort of gathering up all of these orders.

That allows us to print pick lists. And we have a warehouse with ah you know over a thousand different unique SKUs. We take the orders. We actually print.
This is interesting. We actually print paper orders because they're actually are a packing list. The picking team actually goes out and picks the inventory to a pick cart, scanning the orders and the items as they pick them for accuracy.
The orders at that point, the inventory then goes into our engraving department. And we then engrave each item in the engraving department. That's a process.

I'm proud to say that if we get an order before three o'clock, we can get it engraved and shipped the same day, which is kind of amazing. We run enough machines to do that. That's but big part of our value add is that we do fast turnaround and engraving. Once the item has been personalized, we have the order and the item personalized. It goes into our packing department.

Order gets packed in kind of traditional fashion. Although there's, you know, we pack with great care because these are very special items. And those products, once they're packed, we have the packing list and it goes to our shipping room which is basically a series of shipping computers. And that's where we weigh and measure the boxes and, because the order lives in our shipping system first, when we scan that order, at a shipping station, it brings up the order.

And that allows us to look at its characteristics, its weight, the delivery requirements, the, the box size factors that are relevant to deciding how to ship it. And this is where the shipping software kind of earns its stripes.
Because the shipping software we use allows us to multi-rate the package, meaning it looks at all the possible shipping options that we have for that package that meet those requirements.

And it rates that shipment by cost. So, you know, FedEx, UPS, DHL, US Post Office, Amazon, there's different ways to buy that postage. It allows us to see the costs associated with all those choices and the delivery times, delivery guarantees. We make a selection based on price and print a label. That label, once we print it, goes on the box. We sort, pre-sort everything onto pallets and those are loaded ultimately on different trucks depending on and you know what the carrier is, but really sorted by carrier.

A lot of integration, as you would imagine, and in what I just described, the software that we're using at each stage of that process that I described, we have to have the ability to identify that order for what it is and then return its status in that process back to these centralized databases, in effect, that allow these different pieces of software to say, well, that package has been shipped, that package is in process, that package is being picked, that package is being engraved.

So we get a status update as the as the day unfolds. that's pretty incredible. And I can see how each of those different pieces has a different piece of software.

Deb Menter
And as you mentioned, Finale builds into that. I know, I think you're also, your when you go out and scan, you have a barcoding piece that's also ah part of the Finale system that talks to it. So you can really kind of generate each of those events at a certain point. And also I would imagine as someone calls in and we've talked about this, but you know, if you've got a customer service question, people are at a difficult time in their lives and it's a sensitive issue, but they'd be able to get a very quick answer about where their product is.

Jordan Lindberg
Correct. Yeah. So the software, part of the goal in the software is this part of the reporting function is to allow your customer service team to answer a clear, simple question like, where is my package?

Is it going to ship today? If there's a problem, what's the problem, you know? And so part of what makes this integration puzzle so important is that they the information needed to help, for example, a customer service person answer those sorts of questions has to get back to them out of this set of all of these different pieces of software that are doing all these different jobs, you know hopefully ah shaking each other's hand through the whole process. But you know that data has to make its way back ultimately, and that in in your example, back to a customer service person. And Finale, by the way, barcoding, you talk about barcoding, Finale that has a great barcoding solution that that we use and we absolutely love.

Setting something like that up is a technical adventure. you know. Setting up a warehouse for barcode is... i mean that was that was three months of my life I'll never get back.

Deb Menter
But it's all worth it in the end.

Jordan Lindberg
Yeah, it is.

Chris Hondl
I mean, that's a journey we go through, right? So you alluded earlier to inventory management and warehouse management. And you know Finale has always had a solid warehouse management component as part of it in setting up barcoding.

And we're always, you know “my first warehouse management system, my first barcoding system”. So we you know we're not the one that you know the big warehouse with 100 or 200 people picking orders is using, but you're often the one where somebody has been using shipping shipping software and they're looking for some more efficiency and they've got to you know you know a relatively smaller number of people in the in the warehouse team ends up using. And our team you know works with the folks to actually go through that three months of like, okay, how are we going to get this warehouse barcoded and ready to go?

Deb Menter
Yeah, I imagine it's a difficult but highly, highly valuable process. But I think it's so fascinating. I've never worked in a warehouse, but I can envision how much this can really enhance the capabilities that you have as you're working through all of these things. One of the things Finale is really well attuned to and really one of the things that is so advantageous in your product is how you can manage like the different types of marketplaces.

So in some cases it's retail or like a brick and mortar versus online. But Jordan, you talked about different marketplaces that are strictly e-commerce, but all these different places that you're selling. So can you, Chris, can you talk about how you know you work with different clients? And then Jordan, I'm going to ask you to so kind of talk about how you leverage that piece. But how you work with clients to manage those different types of marketplaces and what that looks like for your customers.

Chris Hondl
Yeah, it's really... important right and this is the thing where again you know when do people start thinking about inventory management is you know if you have all your sales in one channel in one order source things are relatively speaking simpler.

But as soon as you have a second one even if it's uh two very mainstream ones you start getting complexity because they're never really truly going to be connected in a deep and meaningful way and what we've done over the years is build out integrations with several dozen marketplaces because what we find is if a customer or a seller, I should say, is on three or four, you know there's usually, there's kind of the usual suspects, but that fourth marketplace, you never quite know which one is makes sense for their business.

And so over time, you know you build out that that long tail and then you actually can find the solution because a piece of software, they can only do three of the five marketplaces a seller is operating on, isn't that useful?
And then what we're able to do is provide that holistic view across all the marketplaces. Sometimes it may be even ah holistic view across multiple accounts on the same marketplace. you know If I've got half a dozen Amazon accounts for you know whatever reason, acquisitions or you know, kind of how are we got accumulated together, being able to have a single place where you can see all of that is something that, you know, we're able to provide.

Or if it's, you know, so it's whether it's lot of accounts on a single platform or a bunch of different platforms, you pull it all together, you get all that information and you're making sure all those different marketplaces are getting up to date information on stock levels. So you're not overselling.

So that you've got the right things available for sale in the marketplaces and you don't have things available for sale that you don't have and so that's kind of the essence of what we've done to approach marketplaces and then in recent years then extending to that to include uh in a pretty significant way point of sale systems and so being able to really support the retail operations as well with the major point sale systems and so you pull that all together and it's like wherever you're selling you're good to go.

Deb Menter
That's great. I love it. So Jordan, yeah, can you talk about your experience?

Jordan Lindberg
Yeah, you know, actually I've got a great use case and it's a perfect example of what Chris is talking about, i think, which is, so we sell, we sell most of, most of what we do is retail sales, but we actually have a, have another business called Reflections Earns and Memorials, which is a wholesale-facing platform. And so we have several hundred small independent funeral home owners who, who buy from us to sell to them. We actually produce a paper print catalog. So in the case of our funeral home customers, they're, they, they get used to selling certain products over and over and over again.

My point is we definitely don't want to go out of stock with those products for those, for those folks, we sell the same product retail. We sell the same product on Amazon, let's say. So which this is, this is the case. So what Finale lets us do and, and other systems do it too, but finale does this really, really well is we can actually portion our inventory by sales channel.

So what happens is if we, if we've got a lot of a particular SKU, for example, and we're selling on all three channels, we we can leave the, the, the valves wide open. And we can sell on all three channels. We can let people do that and so on.

But if we know that, for example, we're going to be delayed in in getting a resupply in a particular hot product for three weeks, what we can do is we can actually go into the WMS, go into finale, and we can turn off the taps to everything but our wholesale buyers, let's say, because we don't want a funeral home to have a funeral homeowner to have to go back to a family and say, i know you picked out this product, but it's out of stock and you're not going to be able to get it no So we can reserve inventory in that scenario for a particular channel.

So the decision to do that can be entirely manual. It can be semi-automated because you can set rules around this within Finale. So there's a certain amount of automation that can be brought to bear on this.
But that's an example of how portioning inventory to sales channel can really be an important factor in your success or trouble. When we sell to the general public, we're giving them a catalog of literally over a thousand products online, but we sell to a funeral director because it's a paper catalog that might only contain 50 or 80 products. We absolutely do not want to go out of stock on those.

For one thing, I spent three bucks to make the catalog. So, it's an example of how one might think through that process of inventory allocation by channel. Obviously, with other industries and other products, there could be other concerns. I share that story because I think it illustrates why somebody would care about this functionality, why I think you like Finale would develop this kind of functionality. What problem are they trying to solve by having this type of functionality?

And there's a good reason for all those things.

Chris Hondl
Yeah, anytime you start doing channels you know there's often rudimentary capabilities in other software but having that deep control you know other areas that really come up is if you're in high value items you know so think you're selling televisions or computers, this maybe if they're refurbished or used, you know you might have three and you're fine but when you get down to that last one you want to make really sure you only have it listed on one marketplace because if that last one sells kind of contemporaneously on two different marketplaces now suddenly you have to go to one of those customers and be like, “Hey I'm sorry we don't have that nice television you just bought”
This happens with flash sales and some a lot of times in apparel trendy flash sales again having that fine-grained control over what you're listing, and when you're listing it and how much quantity you're showing you different places, yeah this comes up again and again in a lot of different scenarios.

And that you know that's kind of bread and butter. That's the kind of one of those core things you get when you get into an inventory management product is having that really strong ability to control you know what you've got available for sale on different marketplaces and being able to do it without pulling your hair out, trying to upload and download spreadsheets all day long.

Deb Menter
Yeah, that's pretty incredible. It never would have occurred to me that you could have that kind of turn it on, turn it off and make sure that everything across all of those different platforms is showing the right number.

Chris Hondl
Selling is brutal. You know it really depends.

It's a horrible customer experience. I've certainly been there. And it' it's brutal for you know for small businesses that are selling on online marketplaces because you can get you can you know lose your position. You can get shut down altogether if you're if you have a lot of overselling.
And so, you know, really being on top of that, especially as your business is growing.

Again, the kind of stuff that's easy when you've got 50 SKUs and you're doing a small number of orders, you're starting out, but gets hard and leads to that kind of but kind of the inventory chaos that we were talking about earlier that we're like not having systems in place really kind of prevents you from growing and kind of you gradually drives you crazy.

Deb Menter
I think it's so fascinating to talk about where these things originate because that's really where the shipping journey starts and then how all of this software is built in to help you make that shipping journey easier and make your end customer be able to see what's happening throughout that shipping journey so the expectation is there.

So anyway, thank you so much.

I really appreciate you both being here. And if you liked what you being here, definitely like and subscribe to this podcast and we will catch you next time on UnBoxed.