Shippit simplifies the end-to-end delivery experience for customers, retailers and couriers alike. Their mission since inception has been to empower retailers with smarter shipping that saves time, money and keeps their customers happy.

Their mission since inception has been to empower retailers with smarter shipping that saves time, money and keeps their customers happy.

Co-founded by William On and Rob Hango-Zada, Shippit launched their platform in 2015, servicing a handful of fashion and homeware boutiques in Sydney’s famous Surry Hills.

As a rapidly growing company, Shippit were focused on building out new features for their platform with their in-house development team. They were looking to out-source their operations needs and chose reinteractive for its OpsCare® 24/7 managed hosting and maintenance service. OpsCare was created to provide a fully supported, monitored and maintained operations platform for Ruby on Rails applications. The service allows clients to release new versions and features as often as they need, while reinteractive monitors and maintain the application, ensuring the application is functioning optimally 24/7.

 

 

Fast forward to today and the Shippit crew has evolved from catering to small boutique businesses in the fashionable Surry Hills area, to powering delivery for thousands of retailers across Australia sending millions of deliveries every single month. Their software has made front page headlines for the work they have done with retailers to empower them to stand out in a crowded eCommerce environment and compete against the threat of online giants such as Amazon.

Complete Peace of Mind with OpsCare Service

Shippit signed up for reinteractive’s OpsCare® service in 2015. They didn’t have their own operations team but needed the peace of mind knowing that their site was available and responsive for users. This allowed Shippit to focus on the platform itself and adding the features that their business and users needed.

OpsCare provides clients with around the clock monitoring and support for Ruby on Rails applications. Our team is located in three time-zones around the world providing 24 hour, follow-the-sun support.

OpsCare is built on top of the world's leading cloud provider, AWS. We don't lock you into a proprietary hosting environment — we build a robust, scalable environment utilizing the wide range of tools available in the AWS stack. The OpsCare team are expert in AWS.

All critical security patches are applied to the application’s infrastructure by the OpsCare team, saving clients the worry of keeping up-to-date on the latest security threats.

 

 

The OpsCare team monitors the uptime of an application using proprietary systems and popular industry standard tools. If an application site goes down, our team is immediately notified. Our goal is for our team to be notified of a fault—and repair it—before it comes to the client’s attention.

Our systems constantly monitor the load on many different parts of the infrastructure; such as web servers, background workers and databases. Load times are monitored along with the speed of database operations and other key performance metrics.

The OpsCare platform includes backups of the system. We take hourly snapshots of the database, which allows it to be rolled back to an earlier state should the need arise. We also do a complete database backup daily, which is kept for 90 days and stored in an “offsite” AWS S3 bucket, is also available if required. The OpsCare team also perform routine human checks on all back-ups to ensure quality and prevent catastrophic failure of the application.

Finally, all of these services are implemented through infrastructure as code, allowing rapid disaster recovery or a complete rebuild on demand.

Benefits from using OpsCare

'The major or biggest benefit has been peace of mind. Not having to worry about whether or not something is being looked at and maintained and knowing that the monitoring is in place. We are a super highly available platform, meaning we have people transacting on our system all day and night and at a very high volume. We are basically like electricity for a shop. So if we go down, the whole warehouse goes down too for our clients.

'As a result of that we needed someone like the reinteractive OpsCare team to be available for us. Our business has been growing 2X year on year and in conjunction with that, ecommerce is growing 15% year on year and then last year, Southeast Asia grew 40%. Because of those numbers and the need for availability of our platform, we look to guys like reinteractive to really support us.' — William On, Co-Founder / Joint CEO, Shippit

Why reinteractive?

In looking for a technology partner, William On stresses doing the needed due diligence and talking to other customers and learning their experiences with the company you are looking to hire. William explains:

'What was also important to me is looking at who is actually working on the engagement. The sales guys can come in and sell the bells and whistles, but what I really want to know is who am I working with on a day-to-day basis? What are they like? I have used other agencies before who didn’t have named project people. That is difficult to work with because one day you might have one person and then day another and this isn’t a smooth operation. We were introduced to reinteractive with good recommendations.

'reinteractive are the industry experts with the needed domain knowledge. That has been super, super important for us for the reason that we didn't have those big skills on the infrastructure side when we started out.

'The responsiveness of the reinteractive team has been great and we have had a super collaborative relationship. I had a direct line to the CEO Mikel as well, which was great.'

Further expansion

With Shippit’s continued impressive growth as a shipping platform, they have now taken over their own infrastructure management, finishing up with the OpsCare service. Shippit have an exciting forward path planned, developing products and features that are at the forefront of retail fulfilment technology.