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Rebuilding Pharmacy Shipping Infrastructure
45%+ improvement in shipping efficiency and operational accuracy.
At a glance
- Problem
- Fulfillment ran through ShipStation. That added third-party cost, manual label and carrier work, and weak control over exceptions and reshipments.
- Ownership
- Product lead, discovery through live rollout: what to bring in-house, how exceptions work, how to sequence carrier APIs against operations.
- Complexity
- Three carriers, live pharmacy volume, cutover risk. An incomplete shipping product is a fulfillment incident on day one.
- Decision
- Treat shipping as an API product — service selection, labels, tracking, and failure states — not a vendor checkbox. Design exception recovery before the happy path.
- Result
- Direct UPS, FedEx, and USPS integrations launched. Shipping efficiency and operational accuracy improved more than 45%. Third-party and reshipment cost pressure dropped.
45%+
efficiency and accuracy
01
Problem
A third-party layer sat between pharmacy staff and the carriers moving product. Cost, accuracy, and reshipments were workflow failures, not generic e-commerce issues.
02
What I owned
Discovery, workflow analysis, in-house vs. vendor scope, requirements for carrier APIs, exception design, and operational rollout — not a demo path.
03
Product decisions
Integrate UPS, FedEx, and USPS directly. Scope each integration as operator-facing product: label generation, service selection, tracking, and recoverable failure states.
Ship on live volume only when exception handling is specified. Train the new workflow and iterate after first use.
04
Result
Proprietary shipping launched on UPS, FedEx, and USPS. Efficiency and operational accuracy improved more than 45%. Operations gained control; unnecessary third-party cost came out of the path.