Introducing the Ground Plus Suite: Matching Speed to Need

In the early days of Veho, Ita and I did everything ourselves – like most founders do.

We were pitching anyone who would take a meeting, running on conviction more than capital, and trying to prove that delivery could actually be a competitive advantage for e-commerce brands instead of just a cost they managed around. We believed that. We just needed someone else to believe it too.

One day, we got a call with a retailer we were really excited about. Big brand, sophisticated logistics team, genuinely interested in what we were building. The conversation was going well until the VP on the other end said something we would hear many more times after that: “Call us when you can take the whole East Coast.”

We were two people. We had less than $100,000 in the bank. We could not take the whole East Coast.

So we started somewhere we could.

Denver first, with a couple of startups who took a chance on us, and then Dallas and Chicago with a couple more forward-thinking direct-to-consumer brands.

Then we discovered that there were some large companies shipping perishables who were already directly injecting their goods into our last-mile markets. We convinced one to give us a single truckload one day a week and let us prove that customer experience mattered. We delivered, and they were hooked. The pandemic came and things exploded - we launched another 9 markets in as many months and raised enough capital to keep up the momentum.

In late 2021 we ran our first overnight truck from Philadelphia down to Baltimore and Washington. We proved the economics one market at a time, one lane at a time, and spent the next several years building a nationwide network that could move a package from injection to doorstep faster and more reliably than anything else out there. And somewhere along the way we started doing the whole East Coast for that large retailer!

That became Ground Plus. Fast, day-certain delivery. For a lot of our clients, it changed what they thought was possible from a shipping partner.

But somewhere along the way, we kept running into the same conversation.

A client would come to us, shipping a high-value order to a loyalty member and a pair of socks to an infrequent buyer with the same service class. Or we would talk to a third-party fulfillment company who manages orders for many small brands who each have their own unique shipping speed promise. Or a company would have a blanket 3-day promise on their checkout page because that was the maximum time it took to get something from their coastal fulfillment centers to the middle of the country, but they were overpaying and beating their promise to their coastal customers by days every time.

All the orders got treated the same way, or they got shoe-horned into a “fast” or a “slow” category. And nobody in the industry had a real answer for how to solve this, because the model everyone had built assumed there were only two modes: fast and expensive, or slow and cheap.

That assumption was wrong.

Earlier this year, we announced FlexSave, giving shippers a flexible delivery window backed by a committed date. Before that, we launched Premium Economy  to fill the gap on the slower, more cost-efficient end of the spectrum. Both products taught us something important: shippers wanted more control. They wanted the control to fully personalize the cost and speed of a delivery to what that specific package, that specific customer, and that specific moment actually required.

That is a much harder problem than offering two speeds. It requires making intelligent decisions at the truck level, the pallet level, and the individual package level, in real time, across an entire nationwide network. It requires an orchestration platform that can hold the promise date sacred while pulling every available lever to get there as efficiently as possible.

We spent years building that orchestration platform. We call it Maestro AI by Veho^TM. It processes a billion data points daily and runs on every truck, every container, every route, and every package decision we make. It is not something you can buy off the shelf, and it does not exist anywhere else, and it is what makes today possible.

Today, we are introducing the Ground Plus Suite.

Everything that FlexSave and Premium Economy proved the market wanted has been built into a single, simplified offering. Five service classes. One handoff. No new steps in your fulfillment flow.

Ground Plus Zero is the fastest speed we can move something through a ground network – the same day-certain performance our clients have relied on. Ground Plus Four is the most cost-efficient, a promise date on your most deferrable volume at the lowest possible rate. And in between there is Ground Plus One, Ground Plus Two, and Ground Plus Three, each a discrete service class with its own promise date.

There are many ways this can be used, but a big initial one is simply to stop over-paying for a single speed and standardize all your shipments around a promised time in transit.

And importantly, for each speed, this is not an estimate. Not “typically within” or “average time in transit.” It’s a promise date that shippers can commit to customers.

The other thing that makes this different is how it moves. You send us your fully mixed trucks, pallets, and gaylords. Every service class, one pickup, no pre-sorting on your end. We take on the complexity of separating it and hitting those dates.

You assign the service class at order creation – Ground Plus Zero through Four, your call, per order.

That means you can default commodity items to Ground Plus Four and move loyalty members to Ground Plus Zero, with no changes to your fulfillment operations. You can run experiments on delivery speed against repurchase rate without touching your checkout page. We ran one of those experiments with a merchant who was showing a three-day promise at checkout. We were delivering the next day. Their 30-day repurchase rate went up 19 percent. Just from the package showing up earlier than expected.

That is what happens when delivery becomes a variable you can actually shape and influence.

For a decade, the conversation in this industry has been about which shipping partner is faster or which one is cheaper. Nobody was asking a more useful question: what does this specific customer, ordering this specific product, on this specific day, actually need? And can we hit that need at the lowest possible cost while still making a promise we can keep?

That is the question Ground Plus Suite is built to answer.

We did not get here in a straight line. We got here through a Philly-to-Baltimore truck running in the middle of the night, through a pandemic that forced us to grow faster than we planned, through clients who pushed us to build things we did not know how to build yet, and through two products that proved the market wanted more than two speeds.

Ground Plus Suite is what a decade of building looks like. We are just getting started with what it can do.

Learn more about the Ground Plus Suite.