Quick Query: RedRoller.com’s Bill Van Wyck

PeC: What is RedRoller.com?

Bill Van Wyck

Van Wyck: What Travelocity does for travel, RedRoller does for shipping packages. The site is built to look and feel like an etravel site. Shipping for small businesses is a day-to-day occurrence. The typical ecommerce business spends close to $1,000 per month and ships 120-150 packages every month. RedRoller is designed specifically for them. RedRoller takes the shipping options available to small businesses and puts them on one easy-to-understand screen allowing the small businesses owner to make better business decisions.

PeC: How can it help smaller ecommerce sites?

Van Wyck: The small company doesn’t have available to them the tools that a large company has such as a multicarrier computerized shipping system. If you had such a system, you’d save 25 percent to 50 percent on your shipping by understanding your shipping service options, but they are very expensive to purchase and expensive to maintain. RedRoller provides that service to small businesses at no charge and a business owner can see on screen that they can save a lot of money by choosing a different carrier or a different service level if they can wait a few hours. Shopping carts are abandoned 63 percent of the time at the point at which the customer sees the prices of the shipping. With RedRoller, you can make the best decision based on the service level and the price that is right for you. By making a decision without knowing your options, you certainly stand a very high chance of spending more than you need to on a given service. On screen, I can choose a shipper, create a transaction, order a pickup, create a tracking number and create a label for all my packages.

PeC: How much does it cost anyone to register or use RedRoller.com?

Van Wyck: We’re completely free. We’re a sponsored service. We do not make our customers commit to anything. We don’t charge them up-front costs, and we don’t charge them any fees.

PeC: RedRoller integrates with an eBay store. Are there options to integrate with ecommerce shopping carts?

Van Wyck: Shortly. RedRoller is built on a web services-based platform so we can actually push this functionality to third-party ecommerce sites. Within about 60 days you’re going to be able to go into a third-party shopping cart and integrate RedRoller as part of that functionality. RedRoller is able to push our services out to third-party sites and allow them to make better shipping decisions.