“We use Sendcloud because of their state-of-the-art, stable platform, that provides us with a wide selection of carriers.”
Kemal Tas | CEO & founder of Ledstores
Ledstores at a glance
The specialist in LED lighting, with +500,000 satisfied customers
International success
Serving both consumers and businesses in 11 different countries
Biggest logistical challenge
Shipping on the same day for both domestic and international orders
Ledstores: “LED’s make a difference”
Ledstores is a leading online retailer in the field of decorative LED lighting. With its specialised online shops, the company serves customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, the UK, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Finland. It also operates other online LED shops in the Netherlands, including Ledstrip-specialist.nl, Ledlichtstunter.nl, Ledpaneelgroothandel.nl and Ledpaneelwinkel.nl. The company has built a loyal customer base, thanks to its strong reputation for reliability, quality, service and speed.
From a side project to a million-euro company
Kemal Tas was just 27 years old when he founded Ledstores in 2012. He came up with the idea of Ledstores when he bought a house that needed to be renovated. At that time, e-commerce was still on the rise, and Kemal spotted a gap in the market: selling LED lighting online.
He started by selling LED strips to private customers through his account on Marktplaats, a popular online marketplace in the Netherlands straight from his apartment in Amsterdam . He converted his upstairs loft into a mini-warehouse with just 10 square meters of floor space. Starting off as a one-man business, he single-handedly packaged every order that came in, responded to customer queries and hauled all the packages to the post office for shipping.
Meanwhile, he was still working full-time as a data warehouse developer. Soon, however, his online LED business had become such a success that he couldn’t keep up with it on his own. So, he hired his first employee.
And within three years, Ledstores had grown into a million-euro company. Kemal decided to quit his IT job and devote his full attention to his fast-growing company. And that turned out to be a very successful career move. In 2020, his company received a long list of awards for its incredible international success.
Full automation: The key to fast, efficient shipping
Our biggest challenge is making sure we ship out orders on the same day as they come in—not just for our local customers in the Netherlands, but also for our international customers. We get a lot of orders every day, and all of them have to be shipped on time. On top of that, we add new products to our shop every week.
Seven days a week
It’s a lot of work to handle all our orders while also adding new products to the shop. That’s why we’re working seven days a week, not just in the warehouse, but also in our sales and support departments.
Sendcloud makes shipping as easy as possible
We want to make our work flow as efficient as it can be, so that we avoid mistakes and get the orders out as fast as possible. That’s why we automate processes whenever we can. Sendcloud has been a big help with that.
A multi-carrier strategy for international shipping
We use Sencloud in combination with Picqer. We take care of international and domestic shipments, but give higher priority to the international shipments.
Pick-ups twice a day
We have arranged pick-ups with DPD twice a day. International shipments are all ready for the first pick-up, so they have a head start getting to the customers.
Offering the best carrier for each country
We want to be able to use the best carrier available in each country. That’s why we’re currently negotiating with Budbee in Scandinavia, for example. The only downside is that we then have to split up our total volume over multiple carriers. We negotiate carefully and work with newer carriers, so a lot of times we can get really good rates.
From Myparcel and a direct integration to Sendcloud
We started using MyParcel, a Dutch shipping platform, back in 2015. But there was no way they could keep up with our international shipping, because they only work with PostNL, the Dutch postal service. So, in 2016, we decided to switch to an international carrier and used a direct integration. The only problem was: their integration wasn’t stable enough to handle all the labels we needed. We started running into all kinds of problems, like numeric codes that had to be adjusted manually, or track & trace emails that weren’t getting sent to customers. It was really frustrating, because we would receive so many support queries from our customers about their shipping.
Wide selection of (inter)national carriers and a stable platform
So, in 2017, we switched to Sendcloud. We chose Sendcloud because of the wide choice of carriers and its state-of-the-art, stable platform. We’ve got our own personalized track & trace page for each of our brands, we can use multiple brands all at the same time and we never have to worry about whether our track & trace emails are getting sent out. We couldn’t be happier with it!
”We were growing fast, also internationally, and needed so many shipping labels that MyParcel and a direct carrier integration just couldn’t keep up. That’s why we switched to Sendcloud.
Kemal TasLedstores
Shipping with DPD, FedEx, same-day delivery, and more
In the Netherlands, we work with different carriers and offer multiple delivery options in our checkout: same-day delivery with RedJePakketje, delivery at a pick-up location, pick-up at our warehouse or home delivery with DPD.
We also ship bulky items like LED panels. At the moment, we’re using FedEx for that. These are high-priced items, and no other carrier will accept shipments of that size without surcharges. We’re also looking at other carriers like DHL and GLS, which you can activate immediately through Sendcloud. The reason for that is because we may need a backup if our usual carriers reach their capacity, or it may just be better to give customers the option to choose a carrier that works best for them locally.
Filtering with Picqer, printing with Sendcloud
There’s a difference between B2B and B2C shipping. We use Picqer to filter these two. Our B2B shipments are usually much larger, so we often have to ship pallets. After filtering in Picqer, with Sendcloud we can print the corresponding shipping label right away.
We’re also constantly looking for ways to improve our work flows and to offer a better experience to our customers. Our products are fragile, and we saw that a lot of shipments were getting damaged in France, so we needed to figure out a better solution. So, now, we always use special packaging materials and put ‘Fragile’ stickers on the packages.
“We’re shipping twice as fast thanks to Sendcloud”
Using Sendcloud has really helped us build trust among our customers. Now, they can instantly see the status of their shipment in our own branded environment.
We work with different dashboards to keep our employees motivated. For example, we can see how many orders our employees handle each day, and who’s fastest. A year ago, we hadn’t started keeping track just yet, but we estimate that we were handling about 50 to 60 orders per person, each day. Now that we’ve optimized our work flows and shipping process thanks to Sendcloud, that number is around 100 per person.
Small improvements to save even more time
At the moment, Sendcloud lets you filter orders by order number. We think we can help our customers faster if we can also search by company name, surname or postal code. From time to time, we get some error messages back from DPD. When that happens, we have to go to their website to check the status. If those things can be improved, we can save even more time.
Insider tip
It’s definitely worthwhile to look for platforms that work well with one another. That’s been really useful for us. It saves a lot of hassle, both for us and for our customers. If your platforms work well together, you can avoid making mistakes and easily find all the information you need. If you want to position your store as a trusted partner, then you need to be well organized and deliver on your promises. Your customers will appreciate that, and your business will continue to grow.
Advantages
- Efficient shipping in combination with Picqer
- Multiple shipping options during checkout
- Track & Trace boosts customer trust
- Multi-carrier strategy for both domestic and international shipping
- Flawless performance and twice as fast
Ledstores ❤ Sendcloud
Sendcloud helps us to make our shipping more efficient in combination with the WMS-system of Picqer. Thanks to Sendcloud, we can ship efficiently and hassle-free with multiple carriers. Plus, the Track & Trace functionality helps us to gain our customers’ trust.
