Today, in an undisclosed deal, Glopal announced the acquisition of the London based Cross-Border Ecommerce Platform, Ekos Global.
Ekos was launched in 2012 by British and Swedish entrepreneurs Fitch Richardson and Andre Borgstrom. The platform enables online retailers to rapidly expand into foreign markets through generating localised versions of their online store. Ekos connects with over 30 popular ecommerce platforms and allows retailers to run their international stores in parallel and in sync with their domestic store.
The technology came out of four years R&D and through client projects with retailers such as ASOS and VisitLondon.
The acquisition of Ekos Global marks the final phase in Glopal’s transition from Amazon and eBay localisation software to full-stack cross-border sales solution.
Over the past seven years Glopal has quietly and steadily become the dominant player in the cross-border space with over 20,000 retailers using their platform. Combining the ecommerce technology of Ekos with the scale, infrastructure and natural language processing capabilities of Glopal, Glopal hopes to further cement their position as industry leader in this space.
Ekos founders Fitch and Andre remain with the business and join Glopal’s team which is spread across offices in the UK, US, France, Germany and Poland. Fitch commented “We couldn’t be happier with the acquisition, Glopal’s vision and our own are so aligned and the acquisition gives us the opportunity to work with an incredible team at an unprecedented scale.”
Glopal’s unique business model makes global trade accessible to even the smallest retailer through a success based fee structure that requires no upfront investment from retailers. Glopal’s success is also being driven by its ability to deliver profitable sales growth to retailers.
In conjunction with the acquisition of Ekos, today Glopal announced the launch of their newest product “Global Stores”. Global Stores, like Ekos’s own product, enables retailers to rapidly generate and deploy localised versions of their store in international markets, what makes this product truly special however, and what places it in an entirely new category is it’s approach to marketing.
In addition to automatically localising retailers’ products and content with human-quality translation, Glopal builds automated international marketing directly into each localised store. For retailers this means that from the moment they launch a new localised store in a foreign market the store will automatically start placing ads on international search engines, price comparison websites, social networks and marketplaces.
Glopal CEO, Patrick Smarzynski said “We are hugely excited with both the launch of our new product and the acquisition of Ekos Global. Ekos’s expertise in taking domestic stores global combined with Glopal’s technology and experience in localising retailers’ businesses at scale is the perfect match. We’ve had a lot of demand from retailers wanting to use the same easy and affordable solution to not only localise their marketplace business but also their own online stores. We look forward to helping even more retailers grow their business globally thanks to this comprehensive solution”.
