Earlier this week, UPS heralded the most recent additions to its Marketplace Shipping offering, which it described as a technology solution that enables merchants to view, process, and ship orders from various e-commerce marketplaces and online stores through a single online interface.
UPS introduced marketplace shipping four years ago to provide customers with a simple option for getting their sold orders into the hands of their buyers, a company spokeswoman told. UPS Marketplace Shipping has been live on UPS.com since January of 2014 but has not been formally publicized by the company until this week.
“UPS recognized the growth trends in e-commerce third-party marketplaces for small business owners and wanted to provide an easy, low cost solution to help them manage and ship their online orders,” she said. “UPS has always been focused on helping our customer grow their business on both a domestic and global platform. This is why we launched UPS marketplace shipping in 11 countries.”
The two new additions to UPS Marketplace, the 19th and 20th companies involved with the offering, are Houzz, a popular site for home remodeling, design and purchasing of related products, and Pricefalls Marketplace, an online retail marketplace offering a wide variety of goods, with Magento, an open source e-commerce platform, added late last year. UPS said it expects to continue adding additional marketplaces, which will further facilitate the ease of shipping and selling on multiple sites.
Marketplace Shipping benefits online sellers by saving time in their order processing, reducing cost from eliminating the need to purchase third- party software programs and benefiting from what the UPS spokeswoman called a “vast array of service options,” including reliable time-guaranteed deliveries and enhanced visibility tools that come from using the UPS network.
In terms of how Marketplace Shipping works, the spokeswoman explained that customers that have created online stores on any of the 20 platforms supported by Marketplace Shipping, simply register their online stores with UPS marketplace shipping to view, edit and ship their packages.
“It as simple as 1,2,3…Connect, view and ship,” she said.
Prior to the introduction of Marketplace Shipping, online sellers had to copy and paste address information from their online buyers shopping cart into UPS shipping systems.
“UPS marketplace shipping was designed to automate this process by automatically pulling in the buyer’s shipping address and then uploading tracking numbers back to the shopping carts once the orders are shipped,” the spokeswoman said.
Michele Cooper, senior manager of customer technology marketing, UPS said in a statement that smart sellers know they have to be on multiple marketplaces to reach the most customers, but juggling transactions from an ever-increasing number of sales sites can get complex.
“UPS Marketplace Shipping is designed to address that pain point,” she said. “UPS Marketplace Shipping is an innovative solution for businesses seeking a tool to offer customizable shipping services in the rapidly-growing world of e-commerce.”