Hey, I'm Junaid!

Humble beginnings

My e-commerce journey began in college when I started selling electronics online. By the end of my senior year, it grew into a sizable business and I started working on it full-time.

I got a warehouse, a couple of workers and we started fulfilling orders. Now we weren't only selling items from our warehouse, but also dropshipping from US suppliers. This is called multi-channel fulfillment in the e-commerce world. To manage fulfillment across multiple channels, we used Zapier and Google Sheets. It worked wonderfully, but as our orders per day started to grow, things started falling through the cracks.

When getting orders is no longer the problem, operations and logistics become the bottleneck.

I looked for software that could manage multi-channel fulfillment, but nothing existed for small businesses at the time. Most businesses that used multi-channel fulfillment would manually have to connect to each channel (supplier, warehouse, etc.). Adding new channels or switching between existing ones required manual intervention and business downtime. I knew if my business was going to scale and thrive (not just survive) I would have to build my own system.

Openship is born

In 2019, I learned to code and started building. At first, Openship worked with my shops and channels only. Soon, it was made to work with any shop or channel. Openship could now adapt to any e-commerce business and their existing operations.

Next steps

The next step is adding support for more e-commerce and fulfillment platforms. Openship's long-term vision is to standardize fulfillment. Whether you're using a 3PL, supplier, WMS, or a combination, being able to switch and add channels with ease is crucial. Fulfillment is changing at a staggering pace. With Openship, you can not only weather the disruption, but also leverage the innovation that comes with it.

The Future

Sales, fulfillment, and support are the pillars of any online business today. The same principles and architecture that Openship uses can be applied to them as well.

Openfront will be an open-source storefront where you can sell anything from goods, to fufillment services, to digital goods. Tightly integrated with Openship, you can fulfill your orders from anywhere.

Opensupport will be an open-source support platform where you can funnel tickets from anywhere and allow your customers to get support through email, text message, chat-bots, online forms, etc. With Openship integrated, your customers and your agents will be in sync.

Openship lets you connect any platform as a fulfillment channel. Opensearch will allow you to search and connect to specific sellers, fulfillment providers, and shipping services regardless of what platform they use.