Pitney Bowes unveils Commerce Cloud
Pitney Bowes has today (26 April) launched a raft of cloud-based commerce and shipping solutions. The news about the services and solutions was rolled out in a series of announcements.
First up, the company unveiled Commerce Cloud, which it described as “a commerce enabler that provides access to solutions, analytics and APIs across the full commerce continuum with speed and agility to help clients identify customers, locate opportunities, enable communications, power shipping from anywhere to everywhere, and manage payments”.
The statement added: “Businesses of all sizes can now securely access – either through PCs, mobile devices, connected metering devices, or via APIs – a full range of shipping, mailing, ecommerce, location intelligence, customer information management, customer engagement and payment solutions that simplify and enable all forms of commerce innovations via the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud.
Marc Lautenbach, President and Chief Executive Officer, Pitney Bowes, explained why the announcement was so important for the company and its clients: “We are reinventing our business by unlocking the vast potential of our digital commerce, shipping, mailing and payment capabilities via the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud and making it easier for our 1.5 million clients to identify, locate, communicate, ship and pay.
“This broadens our addressable market from the $4bn mailing market into the growing $40bn digital commerce and shipping market.”
Pitney Bowes said an integral part of Commerce Cloud is its new SendPro family of office shipping, mailing and payment solutions. According to the accompanying statement, the SendPro solution “revolutionizes shipping for businesses of all sizes by streamlining the sending process in a single, one-of-a-kind multi-carrier office shipping solution, which includes the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx and UPS”.
Mark Shearer, Executive Vice President and President, Pitney Bowes Global SMB Solutions, claimed that SendPro “represents a breakthrough in convenience, simplicity and value much like the launch of the smartphone or the multi-function printer”.
Shearer continued: “Businesses – especially small and medium businesses – are increasingly burdened by the growing complexity of sending parcels, flats and mail through multiple carriers with a variety of rate structures, service levels, and tracking and billing processes.
“Many companies don’t have the volume of parcels and mail or the resources to justify dedicated systems or personnel to optimize their sending.
“The SendPro solution takes the complexity out of multi-carrier sending and can be easily accessed through any smart device or through a new family of integrated shipping, mailing and parcel receiving systems.”
Pitney Bowes also announced that, as part of the Commerce Cloud roll-out, it is introducing Shipping Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for U.S. Postal Service rating and shipping services.
Lila Snyder, Executive Vice President and President, Global Ecommerce, Pitney Bowes, commented: “For more than a decade, Pitney Bowes has been working with clients on technology solutions that help them offer simple and efficient ways for consumers to purchase and print shipping labels.
“We are now taking our shipping APIs and opening up this technology so software providers and systems integrators can take advantage of the best USPS shipping rates available, and the scalability and performance of our technology to meet their customers’ needs.”
Click here to see a video about the Commerce Cloud launch.
