UPS wants to help put some zip into shipping services for online B2B sellers.
The shipping services giant has joined ecommerce technology and services company Inxeption Corp., a San Francisco-based startup, to support Inxeption Zippy, a logistics service integrated with Inxeption’s ecommerce platform. The technology lets online sellers build website pages and load product content; schedule orders and shipments; manage purchase orders and online payments and returned shipments; and conduct search engine marketing and access marketing analytics data.
One of the early beta testers of Inxeption Zippy, building materials supplier Intext Millwork Solutions, says the service is helping it to increase its number of orders while better managing shipments of custom products.
“All of our product offering is built to order, and this creates part of our logistics challenge,” says Joe Umosella, president of building materials supplier Intex Millwork Solutions, an early user of the UPS and Inxeption service. “Our typical order size is three to six thousand dollars and as you would imagine building materials are bulky, so parcel shipments are not an option for us.”
“We are now more efficient in our estimating and quotes of turnaround time, and our online quoting tools are more useful to our customers now that freight is included in our pricing,” he says, adding: “We were subsidizing a percentage of the freight. Now we have instituted a pre-paid freight policy to all customers in any location in the continental U.S. While the product is new, we have seen a real pick-up in orders.”
UPS earlier this said it had made an equity investment in Inxeption, which uses blockchain internet ledger technology to maintain records of shipments and other data. The companies did not disclose the terms of that investment.
Inxeption was founded by CEO Farzad Dibachi, Chief Operating Officer Mark Moore and fellow entrepreneur Terry Garnett, who are former executives of business software company Oracle Corp. and co-founders of internet software provider Niku Corp., which they sold to Goldman Sachs.
Sign up for a complimentary subscription to B2BecNews, published 4x/week, covering technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes DigitalCommerce360.com, Internet Retailer and Internet Health Management. Contact B2BecNews editor Paul Demery at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @pdemery.
Follow us on LinkedIn and be the first to know when new B2BecNews content is published.