SEKO Logistics and ShipStation team up to help e-tailers growth in cross-border markets

Chicago-based third-party logistics (3PL) services provider SEKO Logistics and Austin, Texas-based ShipStation, a provider of Web-based e-commerce shipping services, recently announced they have formed a partnership focused on increasing the ability of e-commerce retailers, or e-tailers, to grow in cross-border markets.

Through this partnership, the companies said e-tailers will have the ability to connect to SEKO Logistics via ShipStation and gain access to various benefits, including:

• reduced transit time and lower cost to international markets for faster expansion;
• reduced cart abandonment rates internationally with lower shipping costs; 
• an easy and monetized returns solution with international in-country return capabilities; 
• unified tracking internationally regardless of final mile postal carrier; and 
• retailer/Seller custom-branded tracking portals

Brian Bourke, SEKO vice president of marketing, told LM that this partnership was spurred on by SEKO’s focus on building out its bundled parcel and freight solutions, including cross-border commerce, next-day, and returns for the past five years.

“We made a strategic decision earlier this year to partner more with technology providers to more easily facilitate the integration of our solution as retailers and e-tailers alike work with such a disparate spectrum of ERP, platform and other technology stacks where both API, EDI and even XML become standard integration formats and can delay the onboarding process,” he said. “We wanted to work with the leader in this space, and ShipStation was the natural start for us as the market leader in helping retailers integrate quickly and easily with both carriers and shopping cart platforms.”  

As for the biggest shipper benefits of this partnership, Bourke explained that ShipStation clients in the USA, UK, Australia and other countries now have immediate access to SEKO’s cross-border, next-day and returns solutions for parcel.  And he added that by providing small and medium sized shippers that ability to leverage SEKO’s cross border reach and final mile postal integrations, they are able to leverage a global solution at both a good price as well as a good transit time.

Looking ahead, Bourke said that the next steps in this partnership are to expand it into is Canada, Hong Kong and New Zealand and helping ShipStation and their clients “as they continue to expand into other markets, as the UK, USA and Australia will remain great destination markets for retailers around the world.”