In this story
Since 2020, Salty Captain has relied on Shippit for cost-effective, reliable, automated shipping across its direct-to-consumer business. Its wholesale freight was a different story, though: manually re-keying orders, invoice reconciliation, and fulfilment blind spots. So Salty Captain adopted Shippit to improve its wholesale freight visibility, control, and performance.
Who is Salty Captain?
In 2019, Salty Captain started life with four SKUs, two team members, and a Shopify site. Today, more than a dozen staff and a sophisticated technology stack shift one million units a year. A collection of 600 SKUs - from marine wash and car detailing products to camping and off-road gear - are sold direct to consumers and to 800 retail outlets across Australia.
Today, that is split roughly 50:50 between direct to consumer and wholesale freight, but through Shippit the business has goals to transition 90% of its shipping volume to wholesale.
The challenge
For years, Shippit had powered Salty Captain’s direct-to-consumer deliveries, but its wholesale freight was the problem.
“We cycled through freight brokers, wholesale freight platforms, and direct carrier relationships. However, none integrated with our existing systems, visibility was limited, manual intervention was high, and the cost was only growing. Every wholesale order was keyed in by hand, then keyed again somewhere else. I’d put it into one system and then spend the next hour doing the same thing in a different one." - Liam Brown, Head of Operations, Salty Captain
Manual entry across 800 stores bred mistakes and “fulfilment confusion”. Because data didn’t flow back, an order could ship in the freight platform while the other systems had no record of it.
When a store flagged a missing delivery, it was often the first time Salty Captain heard of it. Sometimes, the store didn’t flag a missing order for weeks, leaving the team to hunt through four or five different places to piece together a proof of delivery.
“There were a lot of times where we’d be crediting invoices because of the confusion around whether it had or hadn’t been delivered. Our bookkeeper and our wholesale manager were spending 50% of their time just dealing with delivery and invoicing mistakes. We needed a better system that talks to what we’ve already got," Liam says.
The solution
Because Salty Captain already ran its consumer deliveries on Shippit, transitioning its wholesale freight carried clear benefits: the same platform, interface, and team knowledge.
“We’d had other systems where we were only half-integrated, and that had taken weeks. They didn’t talk properly. We had to pay for middleware software to make the two talk. The integration with took me five minutes. I clicked a few buttons and we were away." - Liam Brown, Head of Operations, Salty Captain
Shippit replaced the patchwork of softwares and portals, while warehouse staff were able to see every order - whether shipping to a store loading dock or a shopper’s doorstep - in a single place, instead of pulling packing slips from one system and re-entering the data into another.
While Salty Captain combines its own rates with Shippit’s for its direct to consumer operation, it relies solely on Shippit for its wholesale freight rates. Shippit is integrated directly with Salty Captain’s Cin7 system so order, fulfilment and tracking data stay connected end to end.
Liam says: “Shippit talks to Cin7. I look up the order in Cin7 and I’ve got a direct link to the tracking. This is what’s happening, this is what’s done."
The results
Salty Captain saw immediate savings across two teams, purely from seamless data integration:
- Liam and the wholesale admin lead recovered 10 hours
- The warehouse floor recovered another 5 to 10 hours a week
- Errors dropped from semi-regular to rare
- Invoice reconciliation, chasing unconfirmed deliveries, and issuing credits for failed deliveries - once a half-week drain on the bookkeeper - largely disappeared, because order, tracking, and fulfilment data now lives in one place
“Shippit has saved me and the other wholesale admin person the better part of 10 hours a week. It has saved us a ton of money, too," Liam continues.
The platform also carries a quiet operational advantage, especially for a busy, scaling business:
“Shippit does a lot of complex things in the backend that make my life easier, but what our warehouse workers see is very simple. I can have a staff member competent in using it within a very short time frame."
What’s next?
From humble beginnings, Salty Captain is chasing growth on every front: 20 to 30 new SKUs in the next six months, plus more stores at home and in the US.
As wholesale freight climbs from 50% to 90% of its total volume, the platform underneath it needs to scale at the same pace.
“What we really like about Shippit is the weekly meetings. The team is always providing us with updates on what they’re working on, what’s working for us, what they want to improve. It makes my life easier. As we grow, I feel confident Shippit is going to grow with us as well." - Liam Brown, Head of Operations, Salty Captain
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