UPS and digital engagement platform provider Bridgeline Digital signed a multiyear agreement to integrate Bridgeline’s iAPPS Commerce, an e-commerce product platform, with UPS’s backend warehouse management software, said Bridgeline’s senior VP marketing Brian Bolton and UPS’s marketing director for global logistics and distribution Alan Amling. The two products combine into an end-to-end solution called Total eCommerce.
While Total eCommerce is a combined solution, customers retain the option of purchasing UPS’s warehousing solution and Bridgeline’s e-commerce solution separately, as customers sign individual contracts with each company.
The combination of the two products allows Bridgeline to accommodate customers with warehouse management needs, and it allows UPS to directly provide users with a pre-integrated platform vendor, Bolton said. Prior to this, neither UPS nor Bridgeline fielded a solution that integrated backend warehousing and e-commerce initiatives. “As a result, we were both losing deals to competitors,” Bolton added.
UPS frequently partners with other companies to help deliver thousands of e-commerce shipments, Amling said – noting that this agreement concerns only the warehousing arm of UPS. The package delivery company can now process Bridgeline’s client orders as well as provide “real time info on inventory availability and shipping costs,” Bolton said.
“UPS was actually the catalyst behind finding a solution,” said Bolton. “They mapped out this whole capability and we ended up partnering with them exactly a year ago. We spent 6 months integrating our iAPPS Commerce platform with their warehouse management system.”
UPS and Bridgeline look to complement each other’s services as well as to take the e-commerce designer through all the phases of site development, “from building a site, driving customer traffic to the site, and fulfilling orders from the site,” Amling said.
