In the last two months we’ve won two eBay partner awards, one European and one global. In this post we’d like to share with you a bit more detail of the work we’ve been doing with our customers to win this award from eBay.
Volo Commerce began life as eSellerPro in about 2004, although we list 2006 as our official beginning. eBay is our heritage, as the Volo system was born to help customers manage their growing businesses on eBay. Pretty soon we added management of Amazon and web stores, but as you can see our relationship with eBay goes back a long way and there’s hardly a single Volo customer who doesn’t sell on eBay using Volo Origin and Vision.
Back in 2017 Volo moved in another direction, and as a consequence for a couple of years the business owners at that time depriorised the core customer base and the core partner, eBay. All that changed with the acquisition of Volo by FOG Software Group in September 2019, and we refocused on our customers, our partners and new online multichannel sellers, rebuilding the trust that we’d lost with these three communities.
The timing couldn’t have been better, since 3 months later the Western world was plunged into one of the most turbulent periods in health and economic history, and we were ready to support our customers through times of unprecedented challenges and, for the most part, previously unseen levels of ecommerce growth. In the vanguard of this upheaval was the eBay marketplace, supporting the creation of 50,000 new eBay selling business in the first few months of lockdown, establishing a free NHS portal for front line health provides to order PPE items, and continuing to innovate in 2021 with new initiatives and improvements for sellers.
Our close collaboration with eBay on the PPE portal for the greater good and various initiatives to help our customers grow their business has resulted in two major awards over the summer of 2021, which we feel vindicates our efforts.
In June 2021 we won the eBay Partner Award for the UK and FRITES (France, Italy, Spain) for Implementation Excellence for eBay Managed Payments. Managed Payments is key strategic programme for eBay, as you would imagine for a worldwide project to introduce a new payment system for eBay customers and sellers. For Volo, one of eBay’s 3PPs – as they call us, 3rd Party Providers – this was a major undertaking to make sure our customers could transition to this payment method through the Volo system, so it was great for us to receive this award.
Then, on Monday 12th July 2021, we attended the eBay Connect 2021 global developer conference, run virtually. At the end of the briefing sessions we found out we were winners of one of only 2 global partner awards presented to the marketplace’s hundreds-strong community. Jamie Iannone, eBay CEO, presented Volo with the Early Adopter award. This award was not just for our work establishing the eBay-NHS PPE portal, which we’ve provided pro bono since March 2020 and which by May 2021 had shipped over 3 billion PPE items. It was also for our collaboration on important eBay initiatives like Aspect Adoption, Managed Payments and eBay Fulfilment. You can read about the award in this Tamebay article, and you can see the short video where Jamie Iannone announces Volo as winner here.
After spending the last quarter of 2019 and early 2020 in ‘catch up’ mode with our customers and partners like eBay, to turn it around and in 2021 to win an ‘early adopter’ award from our most important strategic partner – well, it’s hard to put it into words, as you can probably see!
You can get in touch with us here to discuss where you want to take your ecommerce business.
