Just about everyone has heard of Pitney Bowes – they’re the people who do the franking machines for office postage right? Well yes, that’s their heritage and why they’re such a well known trusted brand but today they’re all about ecommerce.
You can still get a franking machine, but today I sat down with Jamin Dick, SVP Supply Chain, Global Ecommerce at Pitney Bowes, who told me how they’d invested heavily in ecommerce with a raft of services to offer.
You may already have used Pitney Bowes’ service, they run eBay GSP. Anyone who’s ever shipped an eBay parcel through GSP has already been an indirect Pitney Bowes service.
What you may not have realised is that you can access a similar service to eBay GSP for your own business. Pitney Bowes have three different ecommerce offerings, white label services such as eBay GSP, Borderfree which the likes of Harvey Nichols use and Marketplace, a service to help online retailers connect to marketplaces in 64 countries around the world.
The reason consumers will love the Pitney Bowes service is that, once integrated with your website, all customs and taxes levied will be billed up front in advance. There will be no surprise invoices from a courier arriving through the post or demands for a payment on the doorstep before the parcel is released. Pitney Bowes service collects these fees up front so that the customer knows exactly what they’ll pay.
Jamin explained that selling overseas isn’t just a logistics problem although their service is part of the solution. The retailers who have the most success are those willing to invest to build their brand and drive traffic. At the very least a retailer needs to commit whole heartedly and adopt an international mindset to build their overseas business.
Once you drive traffic, Pitney Bowes are ready to support you be removing the logistics challenges. They have integrations with the likes of Metapack as well as an API to make direct integrations straightforward.
If you would like to offer your overseas customers a single price including all taxes and duties as well as have a shipping partner experienced in shipping to far flung countries around the world, Pitney Bowes is an option well worth considering.
