Earlier this month, Rakuten announced at IRCE 2013 that it had acquired Webgistix. Last month, NetSuite acquired OrderMotion. While both transactions seemed to come out of the blue, they also made a lot of sense, and could be a sign of more M&A activity among vendors that serve direct-to-customer vendors.
In both these cases, Rakuten and NetSuite were able beef up their order management and order fulfillment systems. For Webgistics and OrderMotion, partnerships with these ecommerce platform giants means more customers down the road.
And whether you compete in the marketplaces against Amazon like Rakuten, or you have clients competing for sales against Amazon, the bottom line is this – vendors, not just merchants, are competing against Amazon.
In this video below, Brandon Jenkins, general manager of etail and retail for NetSuite, talks at IRCE 2013 about his company’s acquisition of OrderMotion.