Pitney Bowes plan to open a new Operations Centre in Dublin that will house a three-year multi-million euro R&D project focused on developing a next generation e-commerce and payments platform for global brands. The press release says:
“The new Operations Centre will comprise a Client Support Centre and Research & Design Centre, creating approximately 100 new jobs for technical support, customer support and e-commerce R&D professionals in the region over the next few years.
As global commerce continues to grow, the platform being developed at the Research & Design Centre in Dublin will create opportunities for merchants to reach consumers around the world and expand into new markets at speed.
This has the potential to be very interesting – Pitney Bowes already power eBay’s GSP. GSP allows retailers to ship to a depot in their home country and Pitney Bowes then take over the shipment and responsibility of shipping to the international customer and paying customs duties so that the item arrives to the end customer duty paid.
What Pitney Bowes don’t currently do is handle the actual payments, on eBay the end customer will pay with PayPal and this will include the element for the product and UK shipping (which goes to the retailer) and the international shipping cost and customs duties (which go to Pitney Bowes).
The press release sounds very much like Pitney Bowes think that they’re on to a good thing with eBay GSP and plan to roll it out to retailers in general with a payments platform bolted on. It may even grow to become a fully fledged marketplace or hosted website platform where you list in your home country and Pitney Bowes make your products available to buyers around the world.
