User segments in shipping & fulfillment (e-commerce)
to inform strategy

Problem

Auctane is the parent company of four brands - Shipstation, ShippingEasy, ShipWorks, and ShipEngine - that provide shipping and fulfillment services to e-commerce businesses. However, since these brands were acquired at different times and for various reasons, they often compete with each other. This can lead to confusion among customers and employees. For example, it can be difficult to recommend one brand over another when they offer similar services. Additionally, deciding whether to build an essential feature for one brand or all of them can be challenging.

To address this issue, we conducted research to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. This effort allowed us to segment customers based on their needs, challenges, attitudes, and other factors. With this information, we developed a portfolio strategy to improve our branding, messaging, and product development.

Project phases

  • Qualitative research: 30 interviews per brand.

  • Quantitative analysis: 125k merchants

  • Synthesis: segment & jobs definition

  • Proposal: What do we do with this information?

Interview Script

User interviews ~30 interviews Per brand / ~45 min each (Every interview was recorded). Those interviews aimed to build a deep understanding of a merchant’s life, decisions, and challenges.

User Interviews

90 interviews were conducted (30 interviews per brand) using the same script.

What we learned: Three insights

1) The portfolio can be divided into five merchant segments (represented by archetypes)

Profile summary per segment

  • Company Type

  • How they describe us

  • Complexity

  • Features they use or want

  • General behavior

  • Jobs to Be Done

  • Quotes

Example of a Segment’s Profile

Why they “hire” us?

Comparison to understand Progression

2) There are two merchant categories: Lifestyle businesses and Growth Businesses

3) We can align brand messaging with categories to target different potential customers.

Outcomes

The outcomes of the research have been utilized in several ways, including:

  • Informing the Sales and Marketing Acquisition Strategy (2022), such as the social media strategy, advertisement approach, and improvements to landing pages.

  • Improving segmentation on the unit economics analysis, where the user segment is now a category in our data tools.

  • Providing clarity to the teams on the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) of each segment. This helped them prioritize features and workflows and unlock innovative opportunities.

Screens from the new PPC strategy

Final report

You can see the deck here: User segments