E-commerce facilitator ShipStation eyes major global expansion

ShipStation, the largest provider of multi-carrier parcel shipping software for online merchants in North America, is planning to expand its international footprint through acquisitions and other means while also broadening freight transportation modes available on its platform, CEO Tom Madine said on the FreightWaves Today show.

The automated shipping platform this week began facilitating less-than-truckload freight shipping in the same workflow customers use for parcel shipping and other logistics operations, a capability made possible by private equity owner Thoma Bravo’s summer acquisition of Worldwide Express Group and its portfolio of freight brokerage companies.

Beyond more modal integration, ShipStation is eager to expand its logistics management technology offerings in Europe and other key markets, Madine said Sept. 1 during a live interview conducted at the company’s Austin, Texas headquarters. ShipStation currently operates in Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Australia.

In Europe, its biggest users come from large enterprises that leverage its tools and micro-businesses that also use the platform to compare and select parcel carriers. London-based subsidiary Metapack provides delivery management technology to e-tailers and other companies. “Our grand plan is to build out those geographies.

There’s a big area of opportunity for us with small-and-medium businesses, in the middle market. That’s sort of our next growth lever,” Madine told FreightWaves Today. “There’s really not a global player for shipping software. ShipStation has the opportunity to be that.”

That expansion could come through acquisitions or partnerships, similar to current carrier relationships under which ShipStation pre-negotiates rates and plugs into their booking sites. “The reason a lot of these mega brands use us in Europe is we manage over 400 [software] connections to parcel carriers around the globe.

Supply chain is different in every country, but at least in the top 15 to 20 e-commerce markets, we think there’s a real opportunity for there to be a global leader,” the ShipStation chief said. Thoma Bravo merged ShipStation and sister companies Stamps.

com, Metapack and Packlink with WWEX Group in early June, with the new holding company renamed ShipStation Global.

ShipStation’s bread-and-butter is providing retailers with digital workflow tools for importing their shopping cart orders from multiple e-commerce stores into a single virtual inventory management system that automatically makes decisions on how to organize, process, fulfill and ship those orders from multiple distributors automatically shop for carriers that meet pre-set requirements for price, delivery time and other factors.

The service tends to appeal to businesses that don’t have the resources, scale or expertise to effectively negotiate discounted rates with carriers.

A key attraction of platforms like ShipStation is that businesses can manage carrier selection, scheduling, tracking and label generation in one spot without having to manually connect and query multiple carrier websites, greatly simplifying their parcel delivery process. Accessing a platform’s capacity saves them time and money.

“ShipStation has allowed us a one stop shop platform so that we don’t have to spend hours every day” managing parcel shipments, said Ned Woodward, director of logistics and fulfillment at Spiceology. “Everything’s integrated from our ERP into ShipStation, and we’ve got labels at our fingertips.”

On the heels of the LTL integration, Madine elaborated on upcoming plans to add truckload freight and final-mile delivery to the parcel platform, saying businesses in sectors outside e-commerce, such as industrial and medical manufacturers, can also benefit from ShipStation’s tools and services to better manage their supply chain.

“We power the platform with a lot of intelligence to help people make better decisions about how to ship their parcels” and freight, he said. Few parcel shipping marketplaces also offer LTL, but a smaller brand called Shipio says its technology coordinates parcel, LTL and truckload movement across 90 carriers and multiple fulfillment locations.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch. Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves. com.

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