VeriShip Acquires Valence, Expanding Cost Savings to Amazon Sellers

Combination creates the first SaaS company to provide data-driven shipping insights for companies that fuel the $3.5 trillion e-commerce industry

KANSAS CITY, MO -- VeriShip, a leading SaaS-based shipping expense optimization platform, today announced its acquisition of Valence, a software and managed service company that tracks Amazon’s operational errors for sellers in its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program.

The acquisition establishes VeriShip as the only software company to offer managed services and insights for small to mid-sized businesses shipping across the world’s largest parcel shipping and fulfillment networks – Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), DHL (OTCMKTS:DPSGY), FedEx (NYSE:FDX), and UPS (NYSE:UPS) – and positions the company at the epicenter of the influential industry sectors of e-commerce and data analytics.

“Cyber Monday’s record sales proved e-commerce will only continue to grow, yet smaller retailers face difficult headwinds as consumers demand shorter shipping times and less expensive rates,” said Ryan Clement, VeriShip CFO. “We know how to help – VeriShip has been advocating for small and mid-sized businesses to manage their parcel relationships and spend with FedEx and UPS for nearly 15 years. Now, we can extend our expertise to Amazon sellers.”

VeriShip and Valence have a shared mission: to leverage spend intelligence to simplify the increasingly complex and often-fraught relationships between shipper and carrier.

Valence’s technology taps into Amazon’s Marketplace Web Service API to identify Amazon’s operational errors in handling a seller’s FBA inventory. Then, Valence associates negotiate reimbursements owed. Similarly, VeriShip combines its industry-leading technology – a cloud-based parcel analytics platform that aggregates and audits data on 70 million packages shipped annually through DHL, FedEx and UPS – with expert data scientists to recover refunds for small and mid-sized businesses. Its data scientists further analyze and compare data to optimize the shipping environment and prevent future overcharges and inaccuracies through carrier contract engineering and predictive analytics.

As e-commerce continues to dominate U.S. purchasing behavior, and the delivery experience becomes as crucial to the consumer as the product, brands want to take control of their fulfillment strategy. The acquisition gives VeriShip the broadest warehouse of parcel shipping data in the e-commerce channel – data that its expert analysts can put to work for sellers struggling to compete.

"SMBs are competing in an ever-changing e-commerce landscape. Meanwhile, powerful multinational package delivery and fulfillment services, like Amazon, are continuously changing the rules,” said Valence co-founder and now VeriShip CRO JL Needham. “Together, the VeriShip and Valence solutions help level the playing field for these businesses whose products fuel the future of retail.”

About VeriShip
VeriShip is a spend management and payments platform that tracks, audits and analyzes shipping invoice data to support small and mid-sized businesses shipping with the four largest U.S. carriers. Its SaaS-based technology platform gives SMBs control of their shipping data with a single source of cloud-based visibility into parcel spend. Its team of data scientists and parcel experts uses the platform’s decades of shipping data to benchmark and forecast, helping clients negotiate shipping contracts and optimize and reduce future shipping spend. Since 2006, VeriShip has helped nearly 6,000 businesses optimize shipping on nearly $2 billion in parcel spend. Learn more at veriship.com/valence.

Source: VeriShip