Quickmail Doubles Fulfillment Business with AWS in 12 Months

Quickmail is a Perth-based family business that specializes in third party logistics (3PL), fulfillment, and distribution solutions. In 2020, Quickmail’s 3PL service experienced a surge in demand after the COVID-19 pandemic triggered an online shopping boom.

However, its business processes and infrastructure—from paper-based billing to manual warehouse operations—struggled to keep up with the order volume. Quickmail realized that it needed to digitalize its workflows and automate its processes in a hurry.

In March 2020, Quickmail selected Mechanical Rock, a cloud specialist and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Consulting Partner, to develop and deliver new digital solutions that would help to reinvent Quickmail’s daily operations, optimize its costs, and improve integration with its business partners.

The successful digitalization of Quickmail’s operations meant it could offer its customers competitive rates. In the last 12 months, its customer base grew by 100% percent, particularly in the cost-sensitive small and medium enterprise ecommerce segment—Quickmail’s key customer segment.

According to Sophie Stott, managing director at Quickmail, the company has successfully scaled its operations, “On an average shopping day, we’ve grown our daily order volumes by over 500 percent, while maintaining the high standards of performance and processing that are essential to staying competitive,” says Stott.

Mechanical Rock used AWS serverless architecture to build GetQuickmail.com, an online platform that provides Quickmail customers with streamlined 3PL solutions. This new platform offers customers detailed information dashboards for visibility of stock and order status dedicated software and customer support, and centralized data to facilitate fulfillment processes. As a result, Quickmail doubled its fulfillment business within 12 months.

To attract more ecommerce customers, Quickmail also made its service offerings available on the Shopify online shopping platform. Mechanical Rock used Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service for Quickmail’s developers to create and easily integrate APIs at any scale with Shopify. With this new platform, Quickmail now has 42% of its 3PL clients using this Shopify integration which currently constitutes almost 75 percent of its overall revenue.

Mechanical Rock helped Quickmail to optimize operations and costs using Amazon Lambda, a serverless compute service to run code with zero administration, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to securely store and protect business-critical data in the cloud.

Mechanical Rock migrated Quickmail’s legacy core application to AWS Cloud, creating a DevOps platform for continuous deployment and efficient testing in a non-production environment. Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service, provides Quickmail’s DevOps team with data and insights to effectively monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, and optimize resource use. With Amazon Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers, Quickmail’s team can focus on building applications in a secure environment without needing to manage servers, and seamlessly integrate these applications into the AWS Cloud without any downtime.

Mechanical Rock worked with Quickmail to develop a new application called QM Receivables, which stores stock delivery information from vendors into a centralized database that warehouse staff can instantly access on mobile devices. Employees can now accurately account and track incoming and outgoing goods, use in-app photo capture on damaged goods, and automate the itemising of work done for accurate billing transparency for its customers.

Hamish Tedeschi, CEO and founder of Mechanical Rock, explains that “This new cloud-native warehouse management tool eliminated manual processes, increased data accuracy, and allowed Quickmail to effectively and easily scale its service offerings according to demand. The solution saved man-hours and also saw faster processing speeds, greater operational efficiency, and better end-customer experience.”

As part of its ongoing digital transformation, Quickmail is rethinking its approach to software development. Driven by end-user feedback, new features and improvements to its business applications are now designed and deployed within hours, instead of weeks. As a result, Quickmail can respond promptly to changing market conditions and nurture a culture of innovation and growth.

Stott concludes, “Embedding efficient practices around software development and deployment has really helped us build up our operational rigor and protect our business from demand fluctuations in a volatile economic environment.”

To learn more, visit Serverless on AWS