Innovative reverse logistics app saves money while doing good
In this podcast, LiquiDonate CTO Aisya Aziz says her company's platform helps retailers and manufacturers donate returned goods to nonprofits, cut shipping costs and boost recycling.
The huge popularity of e-commerce added new complications to already complicated reverse logistics, the process of returning products to their manufacturers or distributors or forwarding them for recycling or disposal. Studies show e-commerce has a higher return rate than brick-and-mortar retail, at up to 20% of products. In addition, the partial anonymity of transacting online and the difficulty of conducting visual inspections make e-commerce returns more susceptible to fraud.
Reverse logistics also has obvious implications for the environmental sustainability of supply chains, and manufacturers and retailers are eager to reduce the cost by redirecting returned goods in more profitable directions.
LiquiDonate was founded in 2021 to provide a novel solution by taking advantage of the speed and accessibility of the web to enable transactions that would otherwise be almost impossible. The company's platform acts as a middleman to route "unsellable" products to previously vetted nonprofit organizations, which receive goods that fill the needs they've identified. Donors spend less than they otherwise would to transport their products. They also typically get a tax write-off using data collected by the platform, which also helps with environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting.
In this episode of Enterprise Apps Unpacked, LiquiDonate CTO Aisya Aziz explains how the software works, its underlying architecture, where it fits in the logistics and e-commerce ecosystem and how it advances circular economy goals of reuse and recycling.
Aisya Aziz
Engineering sustainability
Aziz is the founding engineer of LiquiDonate. Her background in software engineering goes back to her childhood in Malaysia, where she wrote her first program at age 7. She later earned a computer science degree at the University of Maryland and returned home to work in the family IT services business. She then earned a master's from Carnegie Mellon's tech entrepreneurship program while pregnant with her second child shortly before joining LiquiDonate.
Aziz explained the importance of the early architectural decision to use APIs to integrate LiquiDonate with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify.
"They have a return management solution that handles their returns, a warehouse management system that handles their inventory and 3PL systems that handle delivery," she said. "They also have a customer service system that handles all the communication."
LiquiDonate needs to connect to these systems, not replace them. "We want to meet the retailers where they are and become a donation infrastructure to these retailers," Aziz said. "This API design allows us to integrate directly into their existing workflow. Donation becomes a seamless disposition of options."
The challenges go beyond technical integration. The APIs must also harmonize the different workflows of the connected businesses and their systems. It's important, for example, for LiquiDonate to provide shipping labels for other systems. Directing goods to the right destinations is a big part of it. "How do we make sure donations are actually going to donations?" Aziz asked.
Other topics discussed in the podcast include the following:
- Constraints that were programmed into the system to prevent fraud, waste and abuse.
- How AI makes judgment calls for the nondeterministic decisions sometimes required in the software.
- How AI code-automation capabilities could change the career paths of software developers.
- Examples of LiquiDonate customers.
David Essex is an industry editor who creates in-depth content on enterprise applications, emerging technology and market trends for several Informa TechTarget websites.
