- Leading SaaS-based shipping expense optimization platform VeriShip announced it is buying Valence. These are the details.
VeriShip — a leading SaaS-based shipping expense optimization platform — announced that it is buying Valence. Valence is a managed service company that tracks Amazon’s operational errors for sellers in its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program.
This acquisition establishes VeriShip as the only software company to offer managed services and insights for small to mid-sized businesses shipping across the world’s largest parcel shipping and fulfillment networks — including Amazon, DHL, FedEx, and UPS — and positions the company at the epicenter of the influential industry sectors of e-commerce and data analytics. Since 2006, VeriShip has helped about 6,000 businesses optimize shipping on nearly $2 billion in parcel spend.
“Cyber Monday’s record sales proved e-commerce will only continue to grow, yet smaller retailers face difficult headwinds as consumers demand shorter shipping times and less expensive rates,” said VeriShip CFO Ryan Clement in a statement. “We know how to help – VeriShip has been advocating for small and mid-sized businesses to manage their parcel relationships and spend with FedEx and UPS for nearly 15 years. Now, we can extend our expertise to Amazon sellers.”
VeriShip and Valence have a shared goal of utilizing spend intelligence to simplify the increasingly complex and often-fraught relationships between shipper and carrier. And Valence’s technology taps into Amazon’s Marketplace Web Service API to identify Amazon’s operational errors in handling a seller’s FBA inventory. From there, Valence associates negotiate reimbursements owed. And similarly, VeriShip combines its technology (a cloud-based parcel analytics platform that aggregates and audits data on 70 million packages shipped annually through DHL, FedEx, and UPS) with expert data scientists to recover refunds for small and mid-sized businesses. And its data scientists further analyze and compare data to optimize the shipping environment and prevent future overcharges and inaccuracies through carrier contract engineering and predictive analytics.
Since e-commerce continues to dominate U.S. purchasing behavior, the delivery experience becomes as crucial to the consumer as the product so brands want to take control of their fulfillment strategy. And this acquisition gives VeriShip the broadest warehouse of parcel shipping data in the e-commerce channel: data that its analysts can put to work for sellers struggling to compete.
“SMBs are competing in an ever-changing e-commerce landscape. Meanwhile, powerful multinational package delivery and fulfillment services, like Amazon, are continuously changing the rules,” added Valence co-founder and now VeriShip CRO JL Needham. “Together, the VeriShip and Valence solutions help level the playing field for these businesses whose products fuel the future of retail.”
Today VeriShip also announced that it has named a new CEO: Michael George. George is succeeding John Bunch.
