How I Manage Shipping and Inventory

0:00I got an email from Mark who asked me a few questions all around how I managed shipping an inventory and before I get to the question for context in case you're the first this is the first time you're listening to the show. My name is Matt and I run a business called Summary University. It is a education media company. We teach people how to take care of their pools and hot tubs across the world. All through we have two books we have two courses video courses online courses and we have an app and that's how we make money and we promote and market through content. So we do blog posts, YouTube videos, short form vertical videos, we send emails, etc. All right. Now we sell two books like real books. They're about 350 pages each. They're paperback. They're full color. They're fully illustrated. They are printed by us. So we don't go through Amazon or anything like that. We

1:06sell them through our own online store through Shopify which is the e-commerce platform we use and I think pretty much everybody uses nowadays besides maybe WooCommerce and that's our system. Now we get these books printed. Let me just see. Yeah. Well, let me just answer some of these questions in order but that's basically the gist. That's the context of this conversation and this email from Mark who says order processing and invoicing. What internal processes do you have? What software and apps do you use and why? What stuff do you do and what do or how do you automate those things? The difference in process slash software slash time between physical product orders and digital orders and are there any apps slash product slash tools that didn't exist or weren't right that you built from scratch yourself or contracted. So to answer the last question, we never built anything from scratch besides our own app but that's not that's not

2:11to do it shipping and inventory. So the well I say that and I'm and okay so we use Shopify. That's our that's our that's where we're gonna start. Shopify is what people is like it manages our inventory. It supplies the hosting for our sales pages. It you can it's the whole shopping cart system. We pay I think about $80 a month for Shopify and I think they take a little off the top on every order which is how they make a ton of money. I don't know if that's 100% true I have to look into that but it's like you know it's pretty pretty low. So because they they pay us out every Friday and that you can set yourself. So that's the software we use for sales and it's also the software that we use or we used to use I should say to do shipping so I can explain what we used to do and how we

3:16do it now because it's it's good to see both. So we did not build Shopify obviously but we did build the landing pages so I personally code it our liquid Shopify template. So what you see when you go to buy our books or our courses even because we saw those through Shopify as well. What you're seeing on those sales pages is my code. We use Shopify's hosting we are not headless yet although we are definitely thinking about it and if you don't know what that means fine you don't need to know. It's not that important it's really just a tech thing but we host our landing pages through Shopify so technically I did build those from scratch and I literally did I didn't use a liquid template like Dawn which is like the one you can download from GitHub that Shopify makes is their

4:17default and then you can build on top of that. No I built it from scratch because I'm crazy and probably didn't need to do it but did it because every single page is custom coded and looks the way it looks because that's the way I do it. Anyway so yes I did build that from scratch technically now let's walk through the process so somebody finds our book now they can buy our book by going to our actual landing page the the page that I built they can hit the order button which will add it to their cart which is also run by Shopify then they will go to checkout which is Shopify and then they can check out the book and order it that order comes through on our back end of Shopify and then we fulfill that all right the other way that they can buy a book is because Shopify integrates with a lot of

5:19other platforms including YouTube Google Meta TikTok so if somebody buys a book through TikTok like directly from our TikTok store it comes through Shopify they never see our landing page they they order just gets created in Shopify and you can see the source so we can see that okay it was shipped it was a bought through TikTok now TikTok's the weird one because if an order comes through it doesn't come through with any information besides like everything's blacked out so we have to go into TikTok to actually print the label to ship it all right that's what we used to have to do now we have a third party company which I'll talk about in a second so Meta same thing you can be on Instagram you can go right to our Instagram store you can purchase right from Instagram never leaving Instagram and we will send you the book so you never see our sales pages the same thing is

6:23true with Meta and this and the same thing is true with the shop app which is run by Shopify which we do get sales through which is pretty awesome and I do think I'm not I'm not 100% sure but I think you can also buy and I'm sure YouTube is going to come up with this as well I think you can buy our book through Google and or YouTube without leaving those platforms I do think YouTube still sends you to the sales page but Google might not but I have a feeling that one day YouTube is figuring out a way so that you don't have to leave YouTube to buy something so that's coming that is really one of the biggest reasons I will never use anything other than Shopify is because of those integrations they are key to our business they are important all right so then in the past like not not too

7:28far not too long ago we were shipping our own books out of our house out of my house and I say our house because my wife and I staff we were shipping these books ourselves here's how we did it we bought all of our books in bulk from a company called Lulu Lulu is a direct direct print on demand book company they are just the middle man they're just the software so basically what happens is if you ordered a book you can you can you can upload a PDF of your book to Lulu and and a cover the interior and the cover you have to format it their way but you can upload it and then you can just have it exist in their store which is nothing or you can and then if somebody buys it you can have it printed and shipped directly to that customer through Lulu so Lulu goes to a local print company wherever the

8:30sale is kind of they have a bunch of partnerships that that book gets printed one book that book gets mailed to that customer that's the first way we did it and you can connect Lulu to Shopify to handle all this but literally what would happen is every time a customer would buy a book it would charge my credit card for that one purchase and the shipping and then ship it to the customer and it would take about 10 days because the company had to print the book and ship the book per customer okay we that didn't really work out for us it took you know 10 days to get a book to get a paperback book is insane so we stuck with Lulu and we just ordered in bulk so instead of ordering one book at a time and shipping it directly to a customer we ordered 500 books at a time and shipped it to ourselves shipped it to our house and then we set up an area of our house where we would unpack all the books stick them on a big we have

9:33these like three huge IKEA bookshelves that we stuck the books on and I bought a dimo printer a like a thermal printer for labels I bought mailers things that we could pack the books in and I bought a like a generic laser printer that has like a scanner built into it like HP or whatever to print manifests so that we could ship them so basically what would happen at this point is somebody would buy the book and we would pack and ship books every Monday Wednesday and Friday doing it every day was kind of just like it killed us so we would probably ship somewhere between like 50 to 100 books three times a week and which is a lot it's a lot so then you know and that's in the that's during season and the offseason it was much less but we would go into Shopify you would see all the unfulfilled orders we would use there's so built into Shopify you

10:39can print your own labels USPS labels media mail labels directly from Shopify the customer will get notified of all that tracking information because you're paying through Shopify to get those labels you print them out in the thermal printer you pack a book into a mailer you stick the label on and then you got to get it to the post office so there's a couple ways we do that one is we would you know do a whole days worth of you know packing and shipping books for filling orders they call it and then we would print a manifest which would be one piece of paper with a barcode on it where we could take that to the post office they would see all of our boxes but only scan one so they wouldn't have to scan each and each in every package they would scan one manifest and that would enter them all into the system okay so we would either in the beginning every Monday Wednesday and Friday Stephanie would drive these books to the post office hand them the manifest and then hand them all the boxes they would

11:41dump them out into the mail bin or whatever hand us the boxes back and that's what we did three times a week then we got hip to getting the post office to actually pick up the packages so they would pick up every Tuesday Thursday and Saturday because we would pack and ship on Monday and then schedule the pick up for the following day and that was just easier on us but then and that again this is all using Shopify and this was our process then in August of 2025 of August of last year I had I was like okay we need to solve this constraint because Stephanie packing books if we do our job right if we had time to do our job we were so busy packing books but when we did our job right hopefully we'd be selling a ton of books right this was going to get out of hand so we needed to get some company to ship the books for us and we had three different options

12:43that we played with one was actually getting my retired parents back in New Jersey to do it that was one idea and just set them up with the same system that we had at our house over in New Jersey so I'd fly home figure it all out for them and then have them do it right and then pay them for their time that was one idea another idea was to outfit our garage with as like sort of a shipping center and then hire somebody to come over open the garage door and do all the books every single day five days a week or rent a warehouse and that would cost us way more money really not doable a little bit too much control and so we ended up going with this company that we found through we I called a bunch of companies and we found one that basically what they do is ship self-published books for authors like me they do it for Amazon they do it for for Shopify

13:47TikTok all of that and really it's they they kind of specialize in self-published books which is kind of perfect because they had a system and we were we just slid right into that system so now the way that it works is they have their own software I don't I don't think it's custom I think it's something that other companies use and what happens is is when an order comes through on our Shopify site it like we have a plug-in or a shot yet Shopify app that connects to their system and we had to set this all up with the company so like we got on the phone set it all up it only took like 15 minutes and then the company gets pinged that okay hey this order came through they pack and ship the order and then they ping back to Shopify which then sends that tracking information to the customer and then marks the order as fulfilled in Shopify so

14:51basically what happens now is I have a section of a warehouse somewhere in I think it's Indiana I think it's Indiana I know it's Indiana I was like Indiana what's the other one I always think Indiana Indianapolis I Idaho yeah Illinois that's the other one okay so yeah Indiana so I I pay for this section of a warehouse I've never seen it so I've never been there I pay for like this shelving unit basically and I pay per month it's pretty small amount maybe like maybe 40 bucks a month something like that and I have a lot of books there now I have like close to 2000 books in stock both our pool book and our hot tub book so the what happens is as I so I get I charge I get charged monthly for in for like warehousing or inventory and then I get charged weekly for

15:53shipping so what happens is an order comes in Monday through Friday 9 to 5 if an order comes in during that time the order gets fulfilled instantly almost like within 15 minutes so usually by like so if it's Monday at like four o'clock in the afternoon and I log in to Shopify there are no open orders so you know it's it's clean and it's pretty much like that all week except for first thing if I get up super early in the morning they haven't they haven't done the night orders yet and they don't work weekends which is good so they don't it's not a 24 hour shipping operation so like Monday morning there'll be a ton of orders and they'll fulfill those all Monday morning and then from there that's pretty much it now I have access to the software to see like actually what's in stock

16:58in their warehouse and I just make sure that they're both linked up so there's another process here which is what happens when you run out of inventory and how do you know that so the way that works is and I had to set this up with the company they actually asked me this so I've gotten on the phone with this company a couple times there's one person that I deal with it's a small company so it's nice it's like a nice mom not a mom and pop operation but like kind of so I'm talking to what I'm saying okay she's like how what threshold do you want to be notified about so basically like if the books let's say the books are like selling selling selling selling and you get down and you only have a hundred left in stock do you want to receive an email that tells you hey you now only have a hundred books in stock so that you can order and ship us more and that's exactly what I do so when the orders get down to a I only have a hundred books

17:58left in stock that's my threshold then I get an email that just says that and then what I do is I and I'm pretty good with email I I practice inbox zero so I'm very efficient at this when that happens I immediately go into Lulu and order more books and ship it directly to them now because like how do they know it's my books I write that on the you know I write that as part of my name or whatever in the shipping area when I go to Lulu now we're using Lulu right now for our pool books but we have a different printing company for our hot tub books that company is even easier because we get our we get our books printed in larger quantities there because we save money if we do that whereas Lulu we don't get a bulk price discount which kind of sucks but like I ordered a thousand hot tub books and all I have to do is like email the company and say hey just send me a

19:00thousand more they bill me when they bill me for the order right half of it up front then they bill me the other half when they ship it and that's super simple and that's just a process all email based and that's gonna be pretty rare now the other email that I get is when books arrive at their warehouse and they have inventory them I get an email that says hey we inventory 49 copies or 50 copies or 100 copies of the pool care handbook right so that email comes in so what I do is I go into Shopify and I adjust the inventory there do I need to do that no I don't need to track inventory in Shopify but I do like being able to to I rather log into Shopify to just see how many books I have in stock as opposed to like logging into their system which is like not as clean to see how

20:02many books I haven't stock so I pretty sure that's it we don't use invoicing at all so all of that is done through just Shopify and even if we do bulk order so let's say a company wants to buy like a hundred books from us we're just gonna do that through Shopify we're not gonna do invoicing in all that nonsense so yeah it's I would is it automated I guess it's automated like we don't have to ship books anymore so it's like the amount of free time that gave us is insane I just I you know I first I loved and I've said this before I loved shipping books like I enjoyed the process but like maybe once a week dude every day it got a monotonous and you know during peak summer when we were

21:06like running like a ton we man it was a lot man it was a lot and I'm glad like this will be the first full season in 2026 that were that will have this company doing the work for us they've been doing it for the last seven months and it's been like a godsend as far as like the difference in process between physical and digital orders that one is a little easier so we have the physical stuff is all taken care of through this company but the digital stuff I'll talk about the books and then I'll talk about the courses so the books if you can so you have the option to buy the physical version was which comes with a digital version so that's automatically emailed to you after you purchase that

22:06is done through Shopify and there's a there's an app called digital downloads it's made by Shopify and that's it so if you also if you buy just a digital book same process the the this app emails you we also send our own email through clavio so we so technically you get it twice because their version the email just like looks like shit it's kind of basic ours looks a little bit nicer and I can add more information so I just do both in case you get one over the other so that's how we ship digital books now for courses this is more complicated but we're working to solve this so currently we host our courses on podium podium is kind of an all-in-one digital product platform similar to Kajabi but less

23:07feature rich or I guess more simplified same thing is kind of like teachable right it's like it's like you don't need a website you don't need a landing page you don't need checkout system like podium handles all of it and they also host your course and you can sell webinars and you can sell digital products you can do all this stuff and in fact that's the system we used to sell that was our shopping cart and everything but since we're doing physical stuff now we need Shopify so we can't use podium system anymore and plus we want to be able to say hey if you buy a course you can add the book like we wanted that shopping cart system to all be connected okay the problem is that there is no integration between Shopify and podium in fact podium is pretty locked off in terms of being able to integrate with them at all and like through their own platforms but you can do it through Zapier or people say Zapier but I'm like it's

24:11Zapier right because they are called Zaps you don't call them Zapes anyway so you create a Zap that basically says if someone buys the course through Shopify enroll them in the course through podium so I have to pay for Zapier just to fulfill orders that's this way this kind of sucks because I also have to pay for podium so and I have to pay for Shopify so I'm paying for three systems to do one thing so I have two options one is I could invest in a Shopify app to host courses this is not a terrible idea and the reason why is because if someone buys a book and a course they can log into their Shopify account and see both so they can get access to the course and they can like

25:13get access to their digital download for the book and they can see and they can make new orders all this stuff so they would have one account to log into which is very appealing the problem though is there is only really one app that I'm familiar with that does this and I don't think they do video hosting so I would also have to pay for video hosting which I already have with Wistia so not the worst thing and you do have to pay for that but if I do that I won't have to pay for Zapier anymore which is not cheap the other alternative or the other thing that I'm sort of working through is using Thinkific now Thinkific is similar in terms of like it's a all-in-one platform but it's a really robust course platform the problem with that is we don't really have a robust course our

26:20course is fairly simple it's literally just like a bunch of videos we don't offer quizzes we don't offer worksheets like we don't do any of the like we don't offer completion stuff or anything like that we it's really just like a library and so Thinkific cost money but it does have a direct a direct integration with Shopify however and this is the one downside is that yes it has an integration which means if you buy the product through Shopify it will auto-enroll you in Thinkific but Thinkific is a different URL and it's gonna give you a different username and password so this is the big problem that we're running into which is and this could this could be solved fairly quickly and

27:22it's a it's a big solve for us it would be a huge win if we could do this so basically right now the way the way it works for the customer is somebody buys a course and then they get and then nothing happens like literally like they're like okay you bought the course and then I think I write write something in there that's like wait for an email and then it takes Zapier time it's not should be instant to enroll them in podium and then podium sends the customer the email but I'm having issues with this because I don't know it's just it's just a shitty process and I hate the fact that people have to wait to log into a to wait for an email to log into a course and if you're not if you're like bad at email and you have a ton of spam and like it ends up in the spam folder accidentally for

28:23some reason like then I then there's a lot of customer service behind that the same thing would happen with Thinkific except I wouldn't have the middle man of Zapier in between with with with Thinkific they would get auto-enrolled and Thinkific would send in the email and that is a better system but it means that I can't have people create an account on Shopify to log in because the login for Shopify would be different for the login for Thinkific and so they're not unified and then we're also thinking about adding you know accounts basically you being able to create your own account with a username and password for our app and have everything synced so technically the reason why I'm I'm thinking about Thinkific is because Thinkific has an API which means that if we were to

29:27build something custom we could tap into the API from Shopify Thinkific and even Clavio or email marketing software and our own stuff it's a little messy but it's doable now the now the other solution would be to use a Shopify based course platform which does cost money but they would get instant access to the course so it really just removes one piece of the puzzle and I'm pretty sure I would have control over the way it's designed because with Thinkific I don't have control over the design of the course but with the with the course platform through Shopify I'm assuming you have access to the liquid template and you can make changes which is kind of cool but it's a Shopify app and

30:27sometimes Shopify apps are not trustworthy in the same way that like sometimes WordPress plugins are not trustworthy right especially if you start tinkering with them and updating them and then they send an update and it breaks everything so there are issues there but it would mean that I could allow people to create one Shopify account username and password when they log in they would see their orders including their courses and they would have access to the courses and it would be hosted on our own website or at least on Shopify's website which is already kind of ours not terrible now the third solution which is like also not a terrible solution the third solution is we build something completely custom which is we create our own course platform using either WordPress which we could you do and then like WordPress for our content management

31:33Wistia for our video hosting which we already do and then create sort of like a web-based platform it could just be like learn dot some university and then this would be the same platform we'd use for our app so you know it would be all one thing I don't know how to build that my developer would have to get involved with that in order for that to happen so that's like a big lift but we are doing accounts for the app and so how hard would it be to really build a course platform but them unfortunately if we do that then we we you know I'm not going to build in features like oh you get like certificate certificates if you complete something and downloadables and quizzes and like none of that shit would be there because why but if we go with the other two platforms that's built in

32:34and then all we have to do is connect via API so I don't know I don't know yet so we're we're going to figure things out but that's how I manage shipping in inventory if you have any questions shoot me an email or sign up for my newsletter jivinesi.com that's g-i-o-v-a-n-i-s-c-i.com and I'll talk to you next Time