How SHIPAID Unlocked the Growth Capital Big Banks Wouldn't

SHIPAID is a Los Angeles-based shipping platform founded by Stefan Alexiev, offering shipping protection, returns management, and fulfillment for eCommerce brands. The company has partnered with over 500 brands directly and reaches more than 5,000 through a group purchasing organization. SHIPAID is bootstrapped, with no outside investor funding, and has doubled its business year over year.

Built by a brand owner who lived the problem

Before SHIPAID, Stefan ran a cold-press organic juice company out of LA for twelve years. Shipping perishable goods meant managing a cold chain, short shelf lives, and getting product to a customer's door fast, all of which made logistics far more expensive and complicated than shipping a pair of shoes.

This was pre-ButcherBox and some of the other bigger shipping online food brands. We had really no roadmap to go by.

That gap became the basis for SHIPAID. Stefan built a shipping platform for perishable brands during COVID, exited both that business and the juice company, and turned his focus to SHIPAID full time.

It's a combination of all those findings, all that personal pain.

Today SHIPAID offers shipping protection, returns, and shipping rates as one suite, built for merchants who don't want to piece logistics together themselves.

Two new products, no outside funding

SHIPAID has never taken investor money. Growth has come from word of mouth and merchants passing the product along after a good experience.

We have to be very guerrilla in our marketing, because we don't have the type of budgets that a lot of well-invested-into companies have.

That made the timing of two product launches harder to fund. SHIPAID was rolling out a fulfillment network of seven nodes across the country, plus a new returns product covering claim portals, rules, and margin management for reverse logistics. Both needed a marketing push behind them.

Without some type of capital, we could do it, we were still planning on doing it. But of course that slows things down. The pace gets slower, and we're not able to capture as much opportunity in the market.

Stefan had tried traditional lenders before.

I've had a very hard time to go to a regular big box bank and get a proper loan. It's this, it's that, and it never really happened.

What he needed was a lender willing to underwrite against where the business was heading rather than a decade of profitability.

It's a chicken and egg problem with the bigger banks. Fueling that growth is not going to happen until you unlock the proper capital.

So fast, so painless

Stefan came to Wayflyer skeptical, after conversations with other lenders that promised terms up front and delivered something worse once the paperwork arrived.

You're like, this is nothing like what we talked about in the beginning. There's no way I'm signing this.

Wayflyer went differently.

It was so fast, so painless. Within a week or so we had the money land in our account from the time we started chatting.

The terms matched what had been discussed at the outset.

What was talked about in the beginning was actually what ended up being the deal, or even a little bit better than that. I was more than happy to take the plunge and not have to think about it.

The funding let SHIPAID launch its fulfillment and returns products on schedule and get in front of merchants without pulling back on marketing. Stefan's goal for the next two years is to triple SHIPAID's merchant base and become the first call for any eCommerce brand with a shipping problem.

Hey, if you need fulfillment, talk to SHIPAID first, then talk to everybody else.

Interested in following in SHIPAID's footsteps? Wayflyer has funded over 6,000 businesses worldwide with $6 billion worth of working capital, backed by world-leading financial institutions. Apply in minutes and access funds in hours. Start your application today.