Shipcloud – the partner for shipping via vedes.com
VEDES is one of the best-known retail brands in the toy industry. What exactly do these five letters in upper case stand for? You have to look back quite a bit for that, to the year 1904. Then 14 toy dealers founded the Association of German Toy Dealers at the Leipzig Trade Fair and VEDES was born. So much for tradition.
Tradition and innovation
Today, VEDES is one of the leading trading companies for games, leisure and family in Europe and, with its 700 brand partners, is one of the most important toy companies in the German-speaking world. The products are also sold through 3,700 trading partners at more than 7,000 locations. Of course not only on site in the specialist shops, but also via the online shop vedes.com.
Pioneer in online trading
“The online shop has been running on the basis of self-developed software from the very beginning,” explains Timo Weigert from the management for digitization of the Nuremberg company and points out the special challenges with this shop solution. “We have established a central marketplace solution that presents the offers from our retail partners in the areas of games and leisure, babies and trains at vedes.com. If you like, we operate an omnichannel platform for the European toy industry.”
The central marketplace solution
VEDES bundles online offers from specialist dealers under the central marketplace vedes.com and shows the user the nearest dealer based on the GEO location.
“VEDES shops are represented in this marketplace with an online range. Our online shop takes over the complete processing of the order. Customers can therefore combine the convenience of online shopping with the regional support of their local retailer. It doesn’t get any better than that,” says Timo Weigert.
– Timo Weigert , Management Digitization, VEDES AG
Searched and found
To ensure that things continue to run smoothly in terms of shipping, VEDES has been looking for a shipping service provider for the decentralized shipping of the goods from the respective point of sale to the end customer since last year. “We found this partner pretty quickly in Shipcloud. The communication with the colleagues from Hamburg was excellent and the integration of the Shipcloud API into the VEDES digital shopping solution as the central e-commerce platform involved little effort. In short, it went really well,” Timo Weigert reports.
One solution many advantages
When asked about the advantages offered by the Shipcloud solution, the digital professional from VEDES explains that for him the focus is on process optimization for label generation and shipment tracking independent of the final carrier. In addition, thanks to Shipcloud, end consumers can also be offered a convenient option of generating a return label directly and online via the VEDES customer account. “And not to forget,” says Weigert, “the neutral interface with the flexibility to be able to change the shipping service provider at any time.” Of course, every specialist retailer can determine this himself and, if necessary, continue to use existing customer contracts with his own conditions. Shipping is also international, because after all, dealers and customers in the DA-CH area and Italy also belong to the network. The shipping in German-speaking countries has the largest share.
Change is our motivation
“We constructively question the tried and tested and are courageous in developing and improving something new together,” is one of the guidelines that VEDES follows when it comes to innovation. “With Shipcloud, we were able to significantly optimize the process for decentralized shipping at the point of sale of our specialist dealers,” says Timo Weigert, praising the cooperation with the Hamburg shipping service provider in particular.
