Getcho is moving its notification suite from SMS to iMessage with 
Chert.
Group threads that crawled over SMS now land as blue bubbles, onboarding took about 15 minutes, and the team is migrating every SMS notification it sends.
Case study subject
Getcho
getcho.app ↗
Logistics is a communication business
The most productive thing a logistics company can do is communicate.
To the shipper, the receiver, and the carrier. Where the pick-up dock is, where the drop-off zone is, who needs to be there when the truck arrives.
Then the ETA. Again, because it moved 30 minutes later. Again, because now it’s an hour earlier. And once more to say the load isn’t stuck, the driver is just stopping for gas.
Last-mile delivery is where this gets loud. More stops, mostly residential, each one compounding timing uncertainty. Addresses that didn’t exist two years ago and aren’t on Google Maps yet. Weather and traffic that hit harder than they ever do on a 500-mile linehaul.
And ship-from-store adds retail teams on top of it all. They’ve co-opted a shopping space to serve as a shipping node, and fulfillment is just one of the many things competing for their attention.
Meet Getcho
Getcho is the #1 last-mile retail fulfillment platform. The company helps brands and retailers fulfill e-commerce orders from storefronts and warehouses.
It often does that with alternative carriers: Uber Direct, Roadie, or Veho, for example. The carriers that aren’t UPS, USPS, or FedEx can sometimes do better on timing and price.
What makes that network usable is hands-on communication. Storefront fulfillment is less specialized than an industrial fulfillment center, and Getcho closes the gap with real-time instructions sent to store devices.
Same story with the carriers. Gig drivers, who do most of the driving for these fleets, are more flexible but less specialized than a UPS driver. Driver alerts are a big part of how Getcho keeps its loss rate the lowest in the industry.
Where SMS breaks down
Notifications work best when they reach people in the apps they already check. Getcho sends push notifications to app users, Shopify notifications to end customers, and email for performance reports.
Its most-used channel, by far, is texting. End customers, drivers, and store teams all gravitate toward it, so Getcho has used Twilio’s SMS suite extensively. SMS, though, caps how good those notifications can be:
- It’s slow. Messages queue and get backlogged, which matters when the update is “your driver arrives in four minutes.”
- It reads as spam. Green bubbles on iOS carry an association with scammers, so people skim them or ignore them.
- Group messaging barely works. Logistics runs on group threads, and group texting is the slowest, clunkiest part of SMS.
The entire point of the notification suite was to make alerts natural and easy.
Instead, Getcho’s store customers started separate iMessage threads with their human account reps, because they preferred the medium. Getcho’s automated agents can parse latitude/longitude coordinates and reams of notes in under a second. The reps can’t. People texted them anyway.
Customers were routing around the product to get blue bubbles.
RCS first, then Chert
Getcho first turned to RCS, the successor to SMS. On paper it has the features people love about iMessage: reactions, typing indicators, groups that actually work.
In practice, most iPhones had RCS turned off and silently fell back to SMS. A notification channel has to work for everyone or it solves nothing. And even where it did work, people still preferred the blue bubbles. They read as a conversation, not a campaign.
So the team shelved the migration and assumed clunky SMS was the only option.
Then they found Chert.
With a simpler API, priced per message rather than per recipient, Getcho stood up iMessage group notification threads the same afternoon they got access.
Even before the advanced features (creating group chats, adding and removing recipients, segmenting messages by recipient), the switch sold itself. Getcho is now committed to moving every SMS-based notification to Chert.
Spotlight: inventory transfers
Inventory transfers are one of the most common jobs Getcho handles. A store or warehouse needs to send products to another store or warehouse, and every transfer involves at least three parties: the sender, the carrier, and the receiver.
In theory, it’s all barcodes. The sender scans the products and marks them for transit. That dispatches a carrier, who scans them again and drives to the receiver. The receiver scans the packages, and everything is accounted for.
In practice, the three parties coordinate constantly:
Transfer thread · 3 people
With Chert, Getcho places all three parties into a single group iMessage thread. Senders, carriers, and receivers message it directly, and many of those messages trigger real adjustments: route changes, rescheduling, and ETA updates pushed to everyone at once.
What comes next
Getcho wondered whether this white-glove treatment could survive scale as partners grew. Since moving the threads to Chert, the team’s answer is yes.
The migration continues: every SMS notification Getcho sends today is on its way to becoming a blue bubble.