Illustrative case study · MSP
An MSP that stopped holding stock.
A US-regional MSP rebuilt its hardware re-sale motion around drop-shipping through Restart's quote API — ~40 active clients, no warehouse footprint, margin intact. Names withheld for now.
- ~40 clients
- Drop-shipped under the MSP's packing slip
- $0 warehouse
- Physical footprint after the switch
- +18% margin
- Net of the old self-stocking model
Customer
[US-regional MSP, ~40 active clients]. Primarily schools and small public-sector offices in the Midwest. Previously held a rotating ~$250K of Chromebook + peripheral stock in a rented warehouse, absorbing inventory risk and dealing with stockouts during summer refresh peaks.
The brief
- Replace self-stocked inventory with a drop-ship motion through a single refurb partner.
- Clients see the MSP's packing slip and branding, not ours.
- Quote API integration with their PSA (Autotask).
- Clients pay the MSP; MSP pays us on NET 30.
- No change to the client-facing buying experience.
What we did
Reseller pricing with signed NDA
Pulled them into a reseller tier across the catalogue. Margin landed ~18% above self-stocking once warehouse + breakage was subtracted.
Quote API + PSA integration
Their PSA ticket triggers a POST /v1/quotes through our API. Signed quote returns inside the ticket. Approval triggers POST /v1/orders with a blind drop-ship flag and the MSP's packing-slip template.
NET 30 at the MSP level
MSP got approved for NET 30 after 3 months of card-paid trial orders. No personal guarantee; revenue history was sufficient.
Outcome
- Warehouse closed
- 6 months after switch
- +18% net margin
- Across Chromebook SKUs
- 3 hrs/week
- IT labour freed from stock rotation
- 0 brand leakage
- Into Restart-branded packaging at the client
"We run managed services for school districts. Restart is the first supplier that lets us blind drop-ship Chromebooks to the end client with our own packing slip and still get reseller pricing."
What made this work
The four pieces that mattered: a quote API the PSA could actually call programmatically, a blind drop-ship flag that kept our brand off the box, a reseller pricing tier applied across the full catalogue rather than per-deal, and NET 30 terms extended to the MSP entity without requiring a personal guarantee. Remove any one of those and the motion breaks — together they let the MSP act like a distributor without the distributor's balance sheet.