Shippo, the leading shipping platform for growing e-commerce businesses, last week announced Shipping Elements, a suite of embeddable shipping components that ecommerce platforms can easily implement into their existing user interface (UI), streamlining merchants’ access to critical shipping services needed to run their business. With Shipping Elements, e-commerce platforms can now offer feature rich shipping capabilities natively to the millions of merchants they collectively serve, and those merchants get access to the industry’s leading shipping platform so they can fulfill their customers’ orders faster, cheaper and more reliably.
E-commerce sales are projected to surpass $6 trillion for the first time in 2023, and as they continue to grow, merchant demands and expectations grow with it. It’s not enough for platforms just to provide website building for e-commerce, they must provide all the mission critical services including payments, customer communications and marketing services, as well. But while many platforms already have 3rd-party partnerships that allow them to provide those experiences natively, shipping has eluded them as a simplified embedded component. This puts platforms in the difficult position of either building out their own shipping functionality or working with a third party provider to do so from the ground up, both complicated, time-consuming and expensive ongoing endeavors that put them at risk of falling behind.
With the advent of Shipping Elements, however, platforms are able to integrate core elements of Shippo’s industry-leading platform – which provides the scale and expertise that comes with serving more than 120,000 businesses and accounting for hundreds of millions of shipments annually – directly into their own offering. In one simple, easily integrated component, they have access to years of hard-won carrier management, compliance, logistics and route optimization functionality to bring their merchants richer, more flexible shipping services in less time and with less maintenance.
“We’re building the shipping layer of the internet, and essential to that is making it easier and faster for platforms to integrate our shipping technology,” said Andreas Lieber, Chief Operating Officer of Shippo. “Our entire business is solving the complicated challenges of managing e-commerce shipping – from building an intuitive shipping interface for merchants to managing dozens of carrier relationships and everything in between. By making key elements of the Shippo platform available in the form of simple, pre-built components, we’re able to bring our shipping expertise to e-commerce platforms, online marketplaces and 3PLs that don’t have the same resources and focus dedicated to specific shipping challenges we do on a day-to-day basis. With this launch of Shipping Elements, we have an opportunity to become the go-to shipping solution for any platform helping merchants sell and get their products to customers, which equates to millions of new opportunities.”
Shippo’s Shipping Elements are designed to solve the major challenges that platforms face in creating their own shipping function by providing three primary benefits:
- Faster Speed to Market: Rather than worry about building shipping tools or understanding the business logic to build around Shippo’s APIs, platforms simply embed workflows that will handle shipping entirely. Not only does this make shipping smoother for merchants, it enables the platform to focus on the features for which it is able to add value to users.
- Rich Shipping Experience Out of the Gate For Users and Customers: By offering a complete shipping management solution, platforms can unburden themselves from building their own shipping tech stack for their users and enable a streamlined, purchase-to-people fulfillment flow, reducing time and investment required to reach their customers wherever they are.
- Carrier Integrations and Compliance: In addition to technical expertise, Shippo also provides complete management of carrier integrations and compliance; from which carrier integrations are needed, in which market, to ensure carrier compliance requirements are up-to-date. Shippo’s deep background saves platforms valuable time and resources.
In addition to Shipping Elements, Shippo recently released its State of Shipping Report, which chronicles both consumers’ and businesses’ current outlook on shipping and found that the cost of shipping is now both merchants’ and consumers’ primary concern in 2023. Shipping Elements allows platforms to empower their merchants to leverage Shippo’s expertise and relationships to choose the best and most fitting options – including select discounted FedEx shipping services that Shippo recently announced as it became the first shipping platform to receive a FedEx Platform Account.
