Can Your Shipping Options Actually Be a Competitive Advantage?

Jay Myers: Alok, it's so good to have you on the podcast. For everyone listening, I know we know each other super well, but tell me a bit about your background and then why that led to inspiring you to start Trexity.

Alok Ahuja: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me on your podcast. I always love getting an opportunity to chat with you. Usually our chats aren't recorded, so this is fun. But, yeah, on the record this time. No, listen, Trexity is, what a time it is right now, to be sitting on this platform that we're building and scaling.

But yeah, this all started, we're coming up to six years this January. So back in 2019, we started going down this path of, Looking at, you know, what would it look like to build a local delivery platform for small to medium business? And obviously, you know, my background has always been deeply rooted in e commerce,

So for the last 17 years, it's been from, you know, startup in 2006 to building technology around web personalization. When first party cookies weren’t really a thing, to, you know, getting an opportunity to work with. A lot of the internet retailer, 500 companies like Honeywell and Aramark and really going deep into what they were doing with kind of Hybris those bigger clunkier solutions, to then getting an incredible opportunity to work with a local startup here in Ottawa as you.

Obviously know as Shopify. And that's where our paths cross and we became fast friends. it was an honor to work with the people at that company and have impact on Shopify plus from its existence to where it is, and then obviously, building out something that didn't exist in the form of a Shopify plus partner ecosystem, right?

To me, that's where I really got to rub shoulders and get to know, business owners of these digital agencies across the globe. You know, quickly realized this is more than just a platform. This is an entire atmosphere, that revolves around this one thing that was built here in Ottawa.

And, you know, after spending quite a few years and having the opportunity to not just scale the partner ecosystem, but also work on the marketplace side of things to connect plus merchants to agency partners, I was quickly taken back as to, you know, getting caught up in work. And I was, as a lot of us at Shopify we lived, we eat, we breath the platform and the culture and the lifestyle.

And, after about four and a half years, I quickly realized I kind of forgot to be a dad to my kids and, I was on the road a lot. And whether I was in Austin or Raleigh or wherever I was, I quickly realized that, I was missing watching my two very young kids grow up.

And I remember it was actually, I was out of the country and got a call about my father being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And that to me was it. That was the clincher. I remember coming back to Ottawa and going to the office and basically Deciding that I had to step away here for a bit.

I needed to be a father to my kids and, assigned to my pops. and you know this because, you've been a day one believer in what we've been doing here, but my dad was the impetus as to why we decided to pivot and build a delivery solution, right? He couldn't leave the house.

He always needed stuff. To the house every day. and when I quickly started to realize that a lot of these stores didn't have the capacity or the infrastructure to deliver locally, I said, this is a gap, this is a huge gap. And, I essentially wanted all of these SMBs to technically outperform Amazon on local delivery.

They do such a great job and why can't I level the playing field so that every small business across Canada, across the globe has access to this platform so they can. Right away, get something to their customer's doorsteps in a very intimate way. and now here we are, you know, almost six years later with thousands and thousands of merchants across the country.

Tens of thousands of couriers on the platform and scaling every day and it's been an absolute dream. I've had some great opportunities and some great jobs and, Worked with some incredible people, but I will say just on the record, nothing has ever been like this. I've never worked with people, this smart, like minded and driven and had so many laughs and so many dreadful moments where, you know, it's your own company, it's a startup, right?

And you read so many stories about it, but until you actually live it and go through it and read about, you know, we would talk about, you read about, Gary Vaynerchuk story. You read about Tim Ferriss story. You read about all these stories, and I've read all the books, Secrets of Sand Hill Road and The Venture Mindset.

But until you are actually living in those shoes, you don't understand what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering about hey, are we gonna make payroll next week? We gonna get enough merchants to hit our revenue targets so that Investors are going to want to even look at us, right?

There was anyways, I will say it's been an absolute blessing. Like it's just, and I know this isn't for everybody. Cause if it was, everybody would have a startup. So I understand how hard it is now and how much, how much it takes away from the color of your hair and turns it gray. But, but what a satisfying experience.

It's so fulfilling. It's insane.

Jay Myers: I for sure want to get into Trexity and all that details, but I love when, the story is so important, the why, I've talked to founders Actually, I distinctly remember one, it was like a Shopify conference where there was developers there. And I distinctly remember this one, I guess it was like a mixer cocktail evening or something, and, there was a bunch of developers standing around and we started chatting and one person came up and said, Oh, who are you and what do you do?

And I said, Oh I'm with bold. And we build. We build these apps and I said what's your story? They're like, Oh, I don't know. I just we're here. We heard you can make a lot of money making apps on Shopify. And I'm just like, yes, maybe true.

you can make money making apps. Like you can, there's a million ways to make money, but to be truly successful, like as a human doing something that makes an impact that you're proud of. Yeah. That is meaningful that you care about, like there's a hundred other things that go into it.

And you know, your story is, it's like textbook. you worked in the platform. I remember your days at Shopify and what the first, Shopify, I think it was 2016, I want to say, Blair, who, In San Francisco.

Yeah. And Blair, who was head of the app store at the time said, Jay, you got to meet this Alok guy. He's trying to do something with Shopify plus and partners and build some community of partners. And you got to go chat with him. And I was like, who's Alok? Never heard of him, but got to know you.

And, you know, it would be crazy to think of now, Shopify plus without the partner. Shopify plus partners that exist. But at the time, like that was, you were putting that together. That's insane really. Right.

Alok Ahuja: I got that earlier. Is that why your screen just went gray?

Jay Myers: did it?

Okay. Well, we'll see. Can you still see me?

Alok Ahuja: I can hear you.

Jay Myers: Oh, hold on here. There we go.

Alok Ahuja: All right. It happened in Ottawa not too long ago

Jay Myers: So everything's Okay. There we go. I'll trim that somewhere along the lines there. So, okay, so let's dive into Trexity. You said the impetus of it was your dad couldn't get what he needed, reliably and fast. So what did you build?

What is Trexity?

Alok Ahuja: Yeah, so when he Wasn't able to get just basic necessities, things to the house, you know, his medicines, some groceries. I basically said to myself, there's gotta be a way that I can allow all of these small businesses to offer delivery. And I looked at these small businesses, Jay, and micro warehouses, right?

These guys are busting at the seams with inventory. So how can I figure out a way to get them to move that inventory as fast as they could have ever imagined? And you said it earlier, but. You can't build things that you don't truly believe in are the problem that they're trying to solve.

And I do this every weekend. It's all run to the darkest parts of Trexity and that's my weekend. I try to solve that problem, right? And the problem to be solved here was, why is my dad going through this? It doesn't make any sense. And so the goal here was, how can we create a Platform, a fictitious platform.

I called it back then that merchants could log into, they could upload or create deliveries, and then I could have that spread to a network of couriers, and there was a lot of problems to be solved here when I started kind of. Figuring this out in 2018, end of 2018, right? But as my wife always says, it's a gift and a curse, but when I get a problem in my head, it consumes my life in the greatest way.

And I literally can't think about anything else. So what really excited me here was all the problems that I had to solve. Who's going to deliver this stuff and how are merchants going to work with the platform? So in February of 2019, I remember it was a Tuesday night. I put the kids to bed and it was minus 40 here in Ottawa.

Jay Myers: That's every day

Alok Ahuja: that's every day. I remember telling her at night, I said, Hey, I'm going to go to the airport. And she's what are you doing at the airport? And that's where I went and I started hanging out in that area called the Uber lot, where cars would sit and wait for a plane to land.

And that's when I started knocking on the windows of these couriers and I'd ask them questions like, you know, why do you do this? What do you love about it? What do you hate about it? And as I started gathering all this information, I really started to formulate how I could properly service this courier community, but then also provide them with more value than what I capture myself, right?

I needed this to be beneficial for them. So. That was the first part and I'll fast forward to middle of end of 2019 and I launch an MVP locally in the city and I gave it to a handful of friendly merchants that I knew and I said, you know, try this out and let me know what you think and I really wanted to understand do they even care about local delivery like or am I just wasting my time but I also really wanted to see How they interacted with the platform.

So one merchant actually let me sit and hang out in their back room for six hours. And I remember sitting there with my knapsack on and the laptop was open and their staff would come. So part time staff, full time staff, owners would come and start using the platform, would upload the deliveries and then I'd be there if they needed questions, but I tried to be mute.

Cause I really wanted to monitor where I was deficient, right. And where I was good. And that's really how we started to figure out the needs of our merchants. And after about four weeks or so, they came back and the general consensus was this, it's insane, right? They were using words like magical and game changer.

And they were saying the fact that we can offer local delivery as a new proponent of business here is insane. And you're not like one of these. Other modern day robber barons taking 25 to 30 points of our invoice cost so we can actually make money as a company That to me was a huge light bulb moment.

That is when I sat down with my co founders shout out to matt darren and rob and we basically said okay We've got something here. There's something here How do we make this better? And for the duration of 2019, we started to put this into the hands of more merchants. We wanted to really understand which verticals could we service right away.

We, we said to ourselves, we're not going to touch hot food, right? I still haven't received a warm, Delightful order of french fries to my door yet. It just never happened, right? It was a race to zero. we didn't want to move humans, right? So, we said, okay, what's it going to be, right? Is it going to be perishable items?

Can we do alcohol? How are pharmaceuticals going to work, right? We have to adhere to the rules and regulations of the pharmacy college. So, we really started to get into those verticals and really try to build for them, right? we came out of 2019 with a lot of momentum, right?

We had a laundry list of merchants that wanted to use this. The platform was getting better. We were servicing more industries. And then obviously end of February in 2020, we were jolted. We were shocked, when we found out that we woke up one day and we couldn't leave our house and there was this thing called a global pandemic.

And we all just looked at each other and we're like, wow, what happens now? We can't go into these stores and we can't help them and we can't teach them how to use our platform. But then very quickly that sense of uncertainty started to turn into real optimism where we're like, hold on a second, nobody can leave their house.

Only things can be brought to them. And we're sitting on this platform, this local delivery platform that we've been building for just a little over a year, and it's ready to go. And so we all decided to lock ourselves in my basement for about 72 hours. Given my heritage, we had no choice. We built a Shopify app and in a moment in time, when society had told every single one of these small businesses that they had to close their front doors to the general public, we allowed them to stay open by showing up as a shipping option during the checkout process.

And Trex, Trexity exploded. And I think you could, you can have the greatest technology, greatest platform in the world, but there is some degree of timing and luck involved to really make that thing scale. and that was one of those moments. And it's funny now, cause we're almost six years later and a lot of people say, well, you wouldn't be around if it wasn't for the pandemic.

And that's not true because. From the pandemic to now, we've had, rolling recessions, we've had rolling closes, we've had, all types of different things happen, opens, closes, and thankfully, knock on wood, our company, our growth has been up and to the right consistently. Month over month, quarter of a quarter, year over year.

And it's funny because our co founder and COO, Rob, who comes from a background at Lyft rideshare. And prior to that has just been, you know, everything tech, said to me, Elok, I've never been a part of a company that says they're up and to the right, but really is up and to the right. And that to me, just says everything.

This is just such a. It's such an incredible moment that we're in right now that we're getting to witness and be a part of something like this. But yeah, you know, it was an interesting moment when it happened and we just looked at ourselves and said, let's seize this and let's see what we can do here because like you said before, I mean, we're not building this, because we're trying to build an app or a platform that's going to get a super rich.

We're all. In our forties, we're all seasoned vets. We've done this before, but we made a pact to do this because we absolutely love solving this problem for small business and for local economies and getting a chance to constantly get cosigns by the mayor and the BIAs and local business that says, man, we literally wouldn't be able to thrive without you guys That to me is exhilarating and, you know, everybody that knows me, the entire company, my family knows that I will only do something that I am truly passionate about, right?

This isn't your practice life. You get one and I know you feel the same way because. When you get up every day and it doesn't feel like a job and it feels like you're doing your life's work That to me is everything so much so and I know this there's no video on this But I got this on my wall.

I always put out just do what you love. It's a neon sign

Jay Myers: I love it.

Alok Ahuja: It's just it's everything I stand for that's it If you're not doing what you love then like, what are you? What are you doing? What's happening there? Do you know what I mean?

Jay Myers: Yeah. Matt. Okay. So I want to give a little bit of context to this. So, there's probably still people listening right now that don't fully exactly grasp Trexity. Are you just another delivery service or how does it work? So what exactly is the product and the service of Trexity?

Okay.

Alok Ahuja: yeah. I should've said that first.

Jay Myers: That's good. That's my job to pull that out.

Alok Ahuja: Yeah. So, Trexity is a superior last mile logistics technology platform, right? So we're not actually a logistics company or a technology company. So we build technology that allows. Small local businesses to upload, an input deliveries that need to be made into our system.

Or if they have an e com site, they can use one of our mini integrations. And we actually show up as a shipping option during the checkout process. So their end customers will say, yes, I want this delivered today to my house locally. And what happens is when they transact, we suck all that information into their Trexity account and it gets scheduled and out of mind, out of sight.

We have a native courier. App, in the app store and Android and iOS. And we have, tens of thousands of couriers that are on our platform, just like they would use an Uber or a Lyft platform. and that's our community. And so as we build out the scheduled deliveries every day, we build these really, truly optimized routes, that ping, at certain posting windows throughout the day.

And couriers know, you know, at, 830 and 1030 and 130 and 330 throughout the day. Like these are the drops that Trexity has and they can turn their app on. It's predictable. They know what to expect and they can pick up a couple of bundles and they can go off and do their deliveries and earn some really good revenue, some good profit for them.

And that's basically what we get. That's what we do. Early days when we really were trying to figure out what our skin was like, what did we do and how to explain it? We'd always used to say, We're the Uber for retail. And I stopped saying that, for the sole purpose that we're much more than that.

Right. We are truly, partners with our merchants. We don't look at them as, users. We partner with small business because small business. Doesn't have the opportunity to make mistakes. And when they do make mistakes, it hurts their bottom line so much so that they could potentially go out of business.

And so you have to be very careful when you work with small business. It's not like working with an enterprise store where you can have five, six strikes and they'll still keep using you. But small business is much different, especially in the economic climate that we're in right now.

So we're lucky to have thousands and thousands of partners across the Believe in us, trust us to help them be an extension of their business. We're a part of their workflows every day. And that's the technology we've created. So they can use us as a standalone merchant portal, just like you would say QuickBooks or a Shopify admin, or integrate us into your site.

And then we just pull all those deliveries or orders and deliveries right into our system. And you just have to schedule them and away we go.

Jay Myers: a merchant portal, they have, a kiosk or like an iPad or a computer or something at their counter and they can schedule if they need something delivered, you can schedule a Trexity courier to come and get it. If it's on their website and the customer selects same day delivery through Trexity.

It's just automated. It'll schedule the next on whatever sequence, the next Trexity driver will come pick it up and then deliver. So what kind of rates can, like typically FedEx express one to two day is very expensive. I imagine, hours must be more or what kind of rates can people

Alok Ahuja: yeah, that's a great question. We're 80 to 90 percent cheaper than any other legacy delivery platform. it always fills me with joy when sometimes I go to a merchant of ours and I'll go to their website and I'll buy something, whether it's for myself and my kids and my wife, and I'll see, I'm like, oh yeah, Trexity, and then it'll say Trexity, 7.

And then below that, it was like Canada post one to three business days. 1595 Canada express post $23.95 two business days.

Jay Myers: Trexity, one hour, 7.

Alok Ahuja: exactly right. So it's great because. We're changing the psychological buying habits of those customers. They now know they can go to their favorite store and get it much quicker, much cheaper and right away.

And I'll share this one little anecdote, but we've got this incredible merchant. Who's been with us for about five years now. And it's one of these streetwear stores where kids with way too much disposable income go buy 500 pairs of Jordans. I'm guilty of that used to be when I was younger. But he had this big sale coming up on the weekend.

this was a couple of months ago and he said, you know, I'm going to turn off Traxity off the cart and we'll just amass all the sales and then we'll get them organized for Monday and I'll just upload them into Traxity and we'll just build these really nice big routes. And he turned it off Thursday morning and Thursday by noon.

He gets a flurry of emails and he starts forwarding them to me. So I see all these emails coming in and I'm like, what are all these forwarded emails? So I get his number from our merchant success team. And I call him, Hey, is everything okay here? And he goes, listen, we got a problem.

Right. That's small. We're a small business owner too. So I said, what's wrong? And he said, well, Our customers are complaining that we turned off Trexity because a lot of them were saying, Hey, we're leaving for Cancun this afternoon. We just ordered swimming trunks and we always get them on time, but now you turned it off.

We don't know what to do. We want our money back. He said, Alok. I can't turn Trexity off if I wanted to. And so we got to keep this thing on because our customers are so used to it. And there was like 13 emails of people complaining because they were all just so used to getting it right away that,

Jay Myers: Makes sense.

Alok Ahuja: it was insane.

Jay Myers: That's amazing. I mean, you get trained on I don't know if I, we're recording today. It's Wednesday. I know that if I've got something this weekend and if I'm ordering it from Amazon, I'm still probably fine today, tomorrow, Friday. Up in Canada. That's probably too late.

Then one day delivery in my city doesn't happen that much. I actually noticed Amazon delivery seems to have gotten slower. I don't know if that's just me or not, but it prime used to be like one to two day. Now everything seems to be like three to four days, but that's a separate thing. But you're right.

You have this expectation in your head. And if you order once through Trexity, you set a new standard, right? So that's super interesting. You're changing the buyer behavior, right? And that also is. I would think a huge competitive advantage because this brand that you're talking about is changing their customer expectations.

And now if that customer shops somewhere else, it's a poor experience than when they shop with them and get it in a few hours. So to me, that's a positioning. It's not just a shipping service. It's a experience that differentiates you and your competitor might. Not even be able to offer it if your competitor is in a different city.

I mean, when we talked years ago, I remember the first thing that I loved about Trexity is I grew up in a family business, an archery store. A lot of people know my story. It's still, it still exists. Heartland archery. My dad sold it after 30 years, but I was 13 years old. We grew up in it. And I remember in 1998, moving a lot of the stuff and starting to sell online, but it was always so hard to be competitive with prices from other, like the Cabela's of the world and everything.

But the one thing that we could have been competitive on that no one could have competed with us would have been to get something one day to someone like they've got a tournament tomorrow and they need some last minute arrows or something for that, whatever.

Brand you just mentioned their competitor might want to offer it, but they're in a different city and it's a huge Competitive advantage. So are you seeing? Brands use Trexity as a it's not just an option in shipping But something that you don't put on the home page of your site We use FedEx.

We use UPS like This is a differentiator. It seems like

Alok Ahuja: And so what we're finding now is a lot of merchants are using us as a marketing tool. They're saying, Hey, listen, everybody knows this company. Now in these cities, we work with them. So come here because we'll get it. Cause we're Trexity now. So we'll get it up right away. And so, it's been really fun to see a lot of these businesses use us as a ploy to get more customers in.

Right. And, that's exciting. Like we're changing the landscape of commerce a little bit. and they're also starting to change how they operate their businesses. back to that example of the streetwear stores, there was another one across the country that said, you know, we would do these shoe drops where all the kids would line up outside with an opportunity to buy this one shoe.

It was like the sought after. piece of memorabilia almost. he said, the problem is when we'd open those doors, we'd have to hire tons of security because they, kids would come in and they'd try to steal stuff and then they'd run out the store and we'd have a problem with that. what we're doing now is it's an online raffle.

It happens at noon on Saturday mornings. And we tell them all, you'll get it at one o'clock. Cause it's going to come to your door because of Trexi, no paying for extra security, no worrying about kids trying to take stuff from the store. And we know they're only there for that one shoe. So they get it right to their doors.

We've now changed how shoe drops work, right? Like to me, that's just, it's incredible. And, you know, it's in the news. Everybody knows what's going on with our postal service. But now we're starting to get over the last four or five days, a record number of signups across the country.

But now we're getting into some really cool stuff. And I was woke up yesterday. I looked on the dashboard and I said, what is that? And I asked my merchant success team. I said, Hey, what's this, dental clinic? Oh, dental records alone. We're delivering all their dental records across the city. I'm like, what?

I couldn't believe it. And then we've got accounting firms. So tons of accounting firms in Toronto and in Calgary and in Vancouver that just need to get paperwork, closed financials out to the businesses that they represent for bookkeeping. I was like, wow. So we're really starting to see this shape up into something that we could have never imagined, but, it's an honor for these small businesses to trust us and to partner with us.

Like that to me is everything.

Jay Myers: That is, I mean, it's mind blowing, that company in Winnipeg, Miller's Meats, which those who don't know, I think they're just in Winnipeg, but anyways, they, I had the privilege of handing out a $1,000 check as one that they were, what was it? An early bird winner?

Alok Ahuja: early bird winner.

Jay Myers: they were one of the early bird winners.

So, so I'm in Winnipeg and so I went to go, give it to him. And when I went and I, after we filmed a little bit, I talked to him a little bit after, and I said, I'm like, Hey actually, I'm just curious. Like, how are you using Trexity? Cause I, I don't see it on your website. Like they don't actually do, Delivery they just they do pickup and I said, so how are you using track city?

He goes, oh, we're using it like every single day because we have I think they've got four or five locations in winnipeg And they're all at like opposite ends of the city. It's at miller meats They sell like steaks and sausages and pepperonis and everything but one location will often run out of a certain cut like it'll run out of Tenderloin or something.

And they'll need to ship it across the city to another one. And they used to pay an employee to drive there and back. And I, you know, that's like an hour or two to get across the city and back. And he says, I, now I just, I ship it with Trexity and it's like 8. And I don't even know, he goes, I don't even know how they're in business.

It's, I don't know how they get these rates. And I know you guys have done a lot of work in, Your algorithms of the routes and which I want to get into a little bit of the technology behind it. But, it is really interesting to see the different use cases. Like they're just using it to courier between their five locations every day to keep inventory levels the

inventory up So tell me a bit about the, or I mean, definitely don't say it if it's proprietary, but you've done a lot to make, Same day, multiple within a few hour delivery cheaper than, you know, three day delivery. what are some of the technologies and systems that you've done to do that?

Alok Ahuja: for sure yeah, It's been a, we've gone through a lot of changes since we started this company, when it comes to how we handle deliveries and how we stay profitable. And when we came out of the gate, the method we were using, the algorithm, my co founders put together was based on time and distance.

Right. So we would charge a base fee for pickup, a cost associated to the kilometers of travel, and a cost associated to the time it would take for that package to travel. And That was great. it earned us a lot of, a huge margin. However, it was very hard to sell.

Right. And, I would go to a business, a small business, and they'd say, You know, we need your local delivery. How much does it cost? And then I'd always have to go back to them and say, well, where is it going? And that was very tough, right? So, at the time, once the pandemic hit end of 2020, 2021, there was a lot of people trying to do this.

And I studied them obsessively because they all offered this kind of flat fee rate. And Jay, you know me, I'm a numbers guy. So I looked at the data. I'm like, there's no way these guys are making money. and I was right. Unfortunately I was right for them because a lot of them went out of business.

Jay Myers: Were just trying to grab market share and then figure out profit later.

Alok Ahuja: it's grow, like just get all of it. Get all the market share and we'll figure it out later. And unfortunately, it doesn't work in this space. but the great thing is I respected all of them. Anybody trying to solve this riddle has my respect, and I made friends with all of them.

a lot of them approached me, five or six of them actually, instead of localists, we're in trouble. we had eight enterprise merchants. We lost five of them, and we can't raise any more money, and we're in huge debt. And I feel like it's rare that you get to look under the hood of your competitor.

So when they asked me if I'd be willing to buy them, I said, sure, send me over your P& Ls. And that's when I really started to see things and saw that, you know, these 60, 000 a month warehouse leases and, all of them had the same thing and it was called a licensing fee. It's about 25 grand a month.

And I said, guys, what is this licensing fee? And they said, Alok, we actually don't have any tech. And we just pay a company overseas to white label theirs. So, and I looked at my co founder and I said, guys, these were never our competitors. These were a couple of 20 year olds with a warehouse and a few Penske trucks and called themselves a tech company.

So unfortunately all those tourists left the space, but I looked at my team and I said, do you know what we're going to do? And they said, what do you want to do? I said, we're going to offer a flat fee. And they said, did you not just see the carnage of what just took place? And I said no. Listen.

We're going to do it the way we do it, the Trexity way. And let's take our time and let's figure out from a technology perspective, how we can do this and stay profitable and still offer a level of service that's unmatched or unparalleled by anybody. And it took us nine months. It took us the, almost the better part of 2023.

And in October of last year, that's what we launched. We launched what we call ephemeral bundling through optimized driver tours. It sounds fancy, but what we essentially were able to do was we were able to create these. native posting windows throughout the day and fill those posting windows with hundreds and hundreds of deliveries.

And the system will go in and take all those deliveries And it'll map them all across all of the merchants that inputted them. Then it creates these highly dense tours. So what we do is we actually bundle across multiple merchants. And then we have a driver come and pick up from five, six different merchants boom, all in a close area.

And then go to one part of town and make all of those deliveries. And then when they're on that last drop, we hit them with another bundle. And that is actually how we're able to, stay optimized, give, an incredible rate to our merchants that are like, how are they doing this?

And then obviously the most important is making sure we're fair and honest with our courier community, right? They're the backbone of this business. And so we have to make sure that we're not only just giving them humane routes, but we're feeding them correctly, right? And that's always been priority number one, since we started this company.

Jay Myers: How does pricing work? Does it cost brands money to used or does it break even?

Alok Ahuja: so there's no cost to sign up for Trexity, right? there's no annual subscription. There's nothing. It's free. You sign up, you create your crayon, and away you go. However, you pay for the cost of the delivery, and the cost of the delivery is decided by the distance it has to travel.

So we've got radiuses from the merchant store. for example, Three kilometers is five bucks 10 kilometers is six. And 15 kilometers is 8. It breaks out into waves. The lowest you can get is five and the highest you can get is 12 in some regions. Right. And that's roughly about a 50 kilometer radius away from the store.

So when you input all those deliveries, yeah, it's insane. I know. And the reason why we're able to do it and our goal, Jay, like our goal for 2025 is I want to be a dollar cheaper. Like I want to get cheaper. I want to create more dense routes and I want to get more volume of deliveries. the more we get, the cheaper it becomes and the pricing's easy.

now that we've got this flat fee, merchants come to us and say, how much does it cost? I say, we'll plug it in and we'll tell you five bucks on the low end, 12 on the high. they usually, get an average of about 7 and you know, 20 cents for all of their deliveries. then they look at us and they said, that's insane.

And then the beauty of this is we give the merchants an opportunity to say, okay, listen, you can. Through our delivery override rules in the Trexity merchant portal, you can go in and put a rate override And so we know Trexity is going to charge us six bucks. We're going to charge our customers eight because they're already spending 20 on the other legacy delivery partners.

So now we're making two bucks on every delivery. It's way cheaper for our customers and the service is unmatched, right? And so. Now it's hold on, this is a revenue stream for us, right? So that's kind of how we continue to iterate and get better. Like I said to you, I want to be like air to these businesses.

I want them to just think about us every single time they have a customer come to their door,

Jay Myers: So you can get it faster than FedEx, cheaper than FedEx, And they can actually make money.

Alok Ahuja: right?

Jay Myers: That's a, that's what I don't even know. Triple win, win. I know that's insane. that's amazing. And so to use it, let's just talk a little bit about that. Cause there's probably people listening right now.

You said it is a Shopify app that, well, there's a standalone and then it is in the app store. So someone could just go install it. Doesn't cost anything. It shows as a shipping option in their Shopify checkout. They can choose to pad the pricing if they want. it's an option in their checkout let's say tomorrow, they just put that in there today and tomorrow someone chooses it.

Is there an onboarding? What does a merchant have to do to get up and running?

Alok Ahuja: Yeah, it's simple. So and it's funny because one of my good friends is one of the co founders of DoorDash And they've done an incredible job in the United States and you know coming up to Canada with their white label solution We were talking about this a couple months ago, and he's at Elok. I just got a memo here And we're losing merchants to Trexity.

And I said, let me call him. I know him. And so he calls me and he says, you know, he goes, even though we have a white label solution, he goes, it still costs two, three grand for them to integrate into DoorDash. He goes, how do you have such a low barrier to entry? And I told him, and his name's Gokul. I said, Gokul, this is by design, right?

So we allow merchants to sign up within minutes. It takes two, three minutes to create a merchant account. You go to merchant. trexity. com or just trexity. com. They go in, they fill in their information. It's very simple. And then they're given the keys to their merchant portal. Once they log in, it's all onboarded LMS training is there, but we've also got, and it's probably one of the most important parts of our company is our merchant success team and our support team.

And they are there. If you want to book an appointment within your merchant portal, you can book a merchant success manager and have a call with them and they'll walk you through everything and help you get integrated or help you use the platform. But we designed this for mom and pops and we made it very simple.

So much so that I think you already know this, but when we started this in 2019, she was eight at the time, but my daughter was our head of QA. And so I would sit Aria down and I would say, Aria, go in and create a delivery. And we said to ourselves, if she can do it, then any mom and pop in the world can do it because we knew we were building it for people that maybe weren't as tech savvy as you know, you and I are.

So, now my daughter's 12 and she teaches me about tech. So she's come a long way, but, very low barrier

Jay Myers: Head of QA now.

Alok Ahuja: Yeah, now she's running it. But once they create that account, you can literally create an account in three minutes. And then another couple of minutes later, you can be on the road doing deliveries.

Like you can create a delivery, go ahead, post it and away it goes. Right. So that to us was allowing them to run as fast as they can. Right. Really empowering them and not just saying, Oh, we empower businesses. No, we really do.

Jay Myers: And can a merchant restrict Like obviously like Trexity would be an option for certain people based off where they are But if the customer is four hours away, that's just not gonna be an option And so based off of what they put in as their address, does it? You Show as an option or not, or how is that handled?

Alok Ahuja: Yeah, you nailed it. So if they put an address that doesn't fall into the radius in which we can deliver to, we just don't, it doesn't show up as a shipping option. Right. And one of the things that I learned back at Shopify was we could never disrupt the customer experience. Like whenever we built anything.

At Shopify, it was always obsessing over the customer experience. So when we did this, we needed to make sure that it never disrupts the journey that customer goes through with that merchant, going back to that piece of, they're our partners and we can't mess up their business.

And if we do, and they lose revenue or lose customers because of us, They're not going to work with us. Right. So, we made sure that as customers are going through, we don't disrupt that, but yeah, if the address is out, we just don't show up as a shipping option. And for those businesses, Jay, that don't have us integrated onto their website, they'll just put in a shipping option.

That is just kind of your own variable that you've created. They'll then take all of those and they'll just do a Shopify export and we can take an export and we can literally upload it right into Truxley, like the direct

And then they'll just go in and they'll schedule them. Because what's really important about delivery is making sure that you're equipped and ready to get it out.

That day or the next day. So it's really important for these businesses and we help educate them. And we say, listen, it's not always same day delivery, but the same day that you're willing to deliver and to ship it out is the same day we'll drop it off. Cause we don't warehouse anything, right?

Jay Myers: enough.

Alok Ahuja: So the same day we pick it up is the same day we drop it off. So they might get that order on Monday, but they might not fulfill it till Wednesday, but when they fulfill it Wednesday and they give it to us, it's at that doorstep that day.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Makes sense. What's been harder, getting drivers or getting merchants?

Alok Ahuja: That's a great question. Obviously it's merchants, right? It's, careers. And I'll always be thankful to those massive gig economy companies for making driver communities a thing, right? Like you and I could hop on a flight to Miami and land, and there's a driver community there, right? So tapping into those communities and giving them more than what we're capturing is something we've perfected.

Our playbook is very strong there. We tap into these communities relatively fast and with ease. And then we have a very strong retention with them as well. With merchants, it's sometimes it's always an uphill battle, right?

Because they don't know who you are, what you do. And in many cases, delivery is foreign to them. Right. They don't know how to incorporate that into their business. So there is a big education piece for small business, for them to really, truly understand how important local delivery is. And, you know, over the last, I'm going to say 10 years, I think shoppers are now wired, for delivery, right.

They're wired to get things fast. That and I say this to businesses all the time that are like, well, we're exploring it, but we're not quite sure what to do. You don't go onto YouTube and find millions of videos of people shopping online because shopping online just isn't sexy But how many unboxing videos do you see right?

It's a thing. And so we wanted to create a delivery experience. That is a part of that unboxing moment where you're so excited. It comes to the door, you rip open the box. And that's why we spent so much time and effort into the tracking, into the SMS notifications, into the knock, knock. We're almost there, you know, and giving that paper trail back to the merchant so they can see the satisfaction that their customers are getting.

And I said, why would you not want to offer that? Like, why would you not want to give that? Experience to your end customer. And so that really resonates with them. And they're like, yeah, you're right. Like, why aren't we doing that? And so merchants is always the harder one to get for sure.

Jay Myers: That is such a good point. Like every time I order food through one of the food delivery services, my son wants to watch the tracker and see how close it's coming and, Trexity is exactly the same. We ordered something the other day and it was shipped through Trexity and we could follow it and watch it off to the door.

You're turning what is a afterthought shipping into a fun. Experience and part of the whole experience. Like it's, that's a really great point.

Alok Ahuja: Right? That's the moment you wait for. It's an exciting thing. Who doesn't get excited when there's a package waiting for them? Like it's huge.

Jay Myers: Well, and it's a relationship with the brand, not, you know, I know DoorDash does deliveries, like you can order some Walmart stuff through DoorDash and through different convenience stores, but, It's less of a connection with the brand, I feel like, than it is with DoorDash. And so, that must be something that, as a brand, I'm still ordering it through that brand's website through not through a third party marketplace that you like when someone orders something through door, but I don't know if you know this or not, like does, do the, does the merchant any information about who the customer is?

If I go on door dash and I order, it could be Uber delivery. It could be anything, but like I say, I order. I don't know, suntan lotion. And they go and they pick it up. Does DoorDash share any of that info?

Alok Ahuja: The data all lives with DoorDash.

Jay Myers: The retailer has no connection to the customer.

Alok Ahuja: no customer data. And I'm glad you brought that point up because one of the things that we did is when we built out these tracking pages, like you said, it's a moment. Like my son and my daughter to love following the tracking pages.

And what we did is inside the Trexity merchant portal, we allow every single business to upload their company colors and their logo. So those tracking pages are branded. For that business. you might remember this from summit many years ago that Tobi went on stage and I remember he said to us no one should ever know they're on a Shopify website.

We need to make sure that our merchants look like absolute rockstar. And one of the many things that stuck with me and I said, how do we do this here? We want all of these small businesses to look like rock stars so that when a customer gets it, they're like, Oh my God, how did my favorite store just pull this off?

Like they've got their own delivery thing going on here with their logo, their colors in the car. Like it's crazy. And it goes back to that thing. When I say own your customers doorsteps in an intimate way, I mean it right. Not your product in someone else's box with someone else's logo. That to me is a very disjointed experience and that's not what we let happen here.

Jay Myers: It's sometimes so disjointed. You don't even know who or where the product is coming from. There's like the DoorDash convenience section. I think they actually, they have some of their own warehouses. I don't know, but it's, you're right. It's completely so with Trexity, it's a direct relationship so they can remarket them.

They can email them. Like to me, that's. That's I that's that is the advantage of is that my house getting a doorbell your door? Okay Do you need to get it?

Alok Ahuja: No, my wife is pulled up, so

Jay Myers: Oh, okay. Okay, perfect yeah such a huge advantage. You know it kind of works out the doorbell rank because we're getting close to time anyway But I want to I do want to just end on one Actually, maybe two questions one is right now.

There's A lot happening up in Canada. We're going into the holidays and I think there's probably people listening who either are using direct city or who are not using trusted, they fall into two different buckets. So our national Canada post is on strike and this is not the first time this has happened during the holidays.

This has happened multiple times. I know Trexity has been in the news a lot in the last week, stepping in, doing a lot to help out. There's companies, small businesses that 100 percent relied on Canada Post to get their products. What is this? I mean, what are your thoughts on this?

What is Trexity doing and what's the advice you would give brands going into the holidays around delivery?

Alok Ahuja: Yeah. It's unfortunate. It's really sad that it happens every year at the same time. And I won't say much on it because they all have their reasons for what they're doing. And I just feel like as Canadians, if you were really upset with something, you wouldn't hinder the growth of our economy. You wouldn't punish small business across Canada and say, Hey, listen, we're going on strike, but we'll do it January 2nd,.

Let's do this the right way. And unfortunately they didn't choose that route. And so, it's funny cause I had this conversation with somebody at the financial post yesterday who asked me this exact same question. I said, well, what do you think about this? And I think. There's two sides to this, right? There's those pundits, those college professors that are all going on the news and they're saying it's over. They've lost the trust of Canadians and they need to dismantle how they operate, and it's archaic and it doesn't work, and volumes are low and no one wants to use them.

And market share is now going to all of these other new companies that are in the logistics space. And I think part of that is true, right? Maybe they do need to shed some of what they're doing, but I think this is an incredible opportunity. For us as Canadians, to pivot how Canada Post operates. And I've always said this, but this space of logistics will be won through consolidation as all of these different great pieces of technology come together, we can create a behemoth.

This is a chance for us as Canadians to build something so special that on a global scale, they'll look at us and go, wow. How did they pull that out? How is their postal service? How is their logistics game so strong? Because we hit rock bottom. We realized that model is not going to work anymore because the volume's not there, right?

Let's do what and I'm going to quote the CEO of UPS who said this. He said, we see a future where our commerce merchants aren't always going to see their packages on the back of big Brown trucks, but instead we're going to leverage the gig economy. To scale faster than any one of our competitors.

And they did and they won. And I think as Canada post looks at this, they need to look inward and say, how can we do that? How can we leverage all of this great Canadian technology in the logistics space? there's a lot of great technology here when it comes to 3PL warehousing, first mile, middle mile, all of us, there's a ton of us.

We could build something really special. That's a whole nother podcast, but that's how I feel about where we are. I think it's not doom and gloom. I think it's, you know, me, Jay, I will approach everything as a problem solving mentality. How can we fix this and make it better?

Right. We're not, we can figure this out. We're Canadians. We're smart. We know what we're doing. And I think that's how we need to approach this postal strike. But in terms of small business. Don't feel down, don't feel like, Oh my God, we're screwed. What are we going to do? We don't know what's going on.

There's no end to this. They're not giving us any updates. That is not how we operate, right? It's head high. We're going to figure this out. There's a lot of solutions out there. Trexity is definitely one of them. A lot of my colleagues in the industry are doing incredible work. I challenge merchants to go and explore those opportunities because I will tell you this the minute you take the time to invest in to learn about Trexity and others, you will not go back to the way you used to do things.

You will say to yourself, how is that archaic legacy platform even in existence today when Trexity is here? It doesn't make sense. And like I said to you since last week when this was announced, we've had a massive insurgence of merchant signup and the messages we're getting from them is you just saved our black Friday and our cyber Monday, we were literally going to just cancel all of our black Friday sales because we didn't know how we were going to get them out.

and this is the most Canadian thing we can do right now is help each other out. That's what we do, right? we get each other's back and it's the one thing we're known for all over the world. And when other countries come and call, what do we do? We're there to back them up. So now let's do it to one another.

Right. So I challenge everybody is go into this with a problem solving mentality. We're here. We're not going anywhere. We will help, seize the moment, Enjoy your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and even into the holiday season. we do this every year, but unlike Canada Post, we don't say, Hey, get all your deliveries in by December 12th.

If you want your family members to get them by Christmas, we deliver up until December 24th. So if you want to buy something and you're like me and you bought that gift on December 24th, we'll get it to that person on that day and you won't have to worry about it, right? this is a hopeful moment for us, for the entire country.

This is, we have to look at this and say, okay, this happened for a reason. How do we get better from this now?

Jay Myers: It opens up another 10 days of shopping. It's insane. So. If someone wants to get started with Trexity, and we're over time, so I'd appreciate you staying around here. You've got kids coming home and doorbells going off, but

Alok Ahuja: No worries.

Jay Myers: a passionate guy. there is probably thousands of people that can take advantage of Trexity for the holidays.

Most of our listeners are on Shopify. So where is that? how do they get started? What should they do if they want to get started?

Alok Ahuja: Simple. Just go to trexity. com. Trexity.com. And there you can go and sign up for a merchant account. It'll take a couple of minutes. And then once you're in your merchant portal, we have an integrations tab. You'll see the big Shopify logo. You click that and it's a wrap. You're integrated.

Right. It's on your storefront. You can start tweaking, all of the, integration points. You can add your delivery rate, overrides or radiuses, everything. It's so simple to use. And for those who are listening and you can't figure it out, that doesn't mean you're not as smart as my daughter. It just means that you have to lean on our Immersion Success Team and we're always here to help.

So it's very simple to get signed up. I urge everybody to take advantage of this opportunity. and show your customers how forward thinking you are as a business.

Jay Myers: Amazing. Alok, thank you so much and all the best over the holiday season.

Alok Ahuja: Thanks Jay. You're the man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.