To support the growth of small- and medium-sized e-commerce businesses in Europe, FedEx has developed a new program that allows shipping platforms to easily integrate FedEx services into their products and applications via APIs (application programming interface).
According to FedEx, a growing number of e-commerce businesses are looking to outsource elements of their business, with shipping platforms becoming increasingly important. It is expected that the European market for supply chain software will see an annual growth rate of 3.34% between 2024 and 2029, resulting in a market size of US$5.34bn by 2029.
Stijn Meeus, managing director of marketing at FedEx Europe, explained, “A small e-commerce business just starting out is usually able to fulfill orders on their own through FedEx Ship Manager, our standard shipping application on fedex.com. However, once order volumes begin to grow or customers start to expand to other markets, they may look to shipping platforms, and we’re delighted to be able to facilitate the smaller shipping platforms now as well.
“This new program means that more platforms can integrate our services with less overhead. The first integrators are already live, actively onboarding customers. For the small businesses, it means they can ship via more third-party solutions.”
The program is free for shipping platforms to join and is largely self-service to enable a fast onboarding process.