Anyone who sells products online is competing with Amazon to some extent, whether they like it or not, and with other large marketplaces to boot. Shippo’s mission is to help independent online stores bridge the logistics gap. Its service makes it easy for e-commerce merchants to provide a wide array of shipping options, seamlessly fulfilling orders for customers.

The gap yawns especially wide when it comes to optimization. The people running SMBs are busy, and most of Shippo’s customers don’t have a dedicated logistics person to analyze their shipping usage, Shippo CEO Laura Behrens Wu explained.

“Amazon is able to use all their data points across all the packages that they’re shipping in order to further optimize,” Wu said. “Our customers are not shipping that kind of volume right now; they’re still scaling into it or they might be running midsize businesses. We want to give them access to these kinds of optimization opportunities through the data points that we’ve gathered, not just for their shipments but for also what we’re seeing for other people’s shipments.”

On Wednesday, the company announced that its workflow will now include “smart” recommendations powered by machine learning. “We’ve taken a look at all the data that we’re sitting atop and figured out, ‘What can we make that’s configurable for the user to save them from having to make repetitive actions?'” senior product manager Stephen Conn said.

via This Startup Is Closing the Logistics Gap That Allows Amazon to Dominate E-Commerce | Inc.com