Bolloré ties up with e-commerce tech provider Oro

Third-party logistics provider Bolloré will integrate Oro’s business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce interface with its global logistics platform to better coordinate online orders with downstream activities.    E-commerce is at or near the top of every shipper’s priority list when it comes to strategizing around logistics.
   The impact and growth rate of online sales is impossible for anyone to ignore, even for companies that predominantly sell in a B2B environment. And that became clear to a group of entrepreneurs that developed one of the most successful business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce platforms, Magento.
   When the open source platform Magento was sold to eBay in 2011, a group of people critical to its success turned to what they considered the next phase of open-source e-commerce: business-to-business (B2B) sales. So they founded Oro in 2012, based in large part on how they saw Magento being used.
   “We saw two gaps,” Motti Danino, chief operating officer of Oro, said in an interview with American Shipper. “We saw a lot of online retailers had multi-channel, multi-user (customer relationship management system) issues. And the other thing we saw was companies that needed an e-commerce platform but weren’t B2C, and it’s different.”
   Danino, who was an early employee at Magento, said his previous company would often adapt or customize the platform to suit B2B needs, but it was not an ideal solution.
   “It’s much easier to go from a B2B to B2C platform than the other way around,” he said.
   Based in Los Angeles, Oro has built a steady roster of users that use it to connect manufacturers to their customers, not the end customer. That approach relied upon Oro selling itself enterprise by enterprise.
   A way to scale the growth of the platform is to tap into companies that touch multiple enterprises and on Tuesday, Oro announced it has engaged in a partnership with the Puteaux, France-based global third-party provider Bolloré Logistics.
   Bolloré will use OroCommerce as its interface between its traditional bundled logistics services – a platform Bolloré calls LINK – and its customers. The concept is to provide Bolloré’s international customers with e-commerce capability that’s fully integrated with its global logistics platform.
   “Our partnership with OroCommerce is part of our long-term strategy to prioritize technology innovation that solves our clients’ modern business challenges,” said Frédéric Serra, director of solutions at Bolloré Logistics.
   Danino said having a properly configured e-commerce interface is critical to downstream logistics activities tied to the online order.
   “A customer goes to place an order,” he said. “The system identifies the customer immediately or when they’re entering a shipping destination. The order is placed through Bollore system. They instantly know the quantity, the type of products, where the availability is, the customer is ordering from this country and want it delivered to this address. They manage the order and ship it to the customer. They can monitor stock levels, replenish the warehouse. They can manage the back-end.
   Danino said Bolloré’s existing system isn’t user friendly.
   “If the customer doesn’t have the capability they need, they’ll buy less,” he said. “We provide this really efficient interface.”
   Oro was brought into the partnership by a Bolloré customer that was initially going to use Magento for its e-commerce front-end and persuaded the logistics company to adopt Oro and integrate it into its other services.
   For Oro, the partnership “exposes us to a huge customer base we can tap into to,” Danino said.