Case Study: College Outside achieves scalable drop-ship automation and improved customer experience with TrueCommerce

The Case of College Outside Adopting TrueCommerce Drop Ship and eCommerce Solutions

College Outside is a members-only online retailer of outdoor gear serving college students and outdoor education groups that relies on a drop-ship model with more than 50 brand partners. Faced with manual, error-prone order and inventory exchanges that caused out-of-stocks, delays and constrained growth, College Outside turned to TrueCommerce and its TrueCommerce Nexternal eCommerce platform plus the TrueCommerce supplier enablement (cloud-based supply chain integration) to streamline drop-ship operations.

TrueCommerce implemented a cloud integration linking College Outside’s Nexternal storefront to vendors’ order management systems, automating POs, invoices, inventory updates, shipment confirmations and tracking at the line-item level. The result: significantly reduced operational costs through automated invoice/PO exchange, timely inventory updates that eliminate out-of-stock listings, faster fulfillment and improved customer notifications — all backed by responsive TrueCommerce support — with the program launched initially with two key brands in October 2019 and a plan to scale.

College Outside

Sarah Lockwood

Founder and CEO