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- Tecnoacquisti.com
- PrestaShop Blog and Ecommerce Tutorial
Mail Boxes Etc , a network of sales centers specializing in packaging, logistics and shipping and office products, has recently acquired the French company PrestaShop SA. MBE was born in San Diego, California in 1980 and in 1993 the brand was brought to Italy by the Fiorelli family, and in 2009 Paolo Fiorelli acquired the company MBE Worldwide and all the rights to use the brand all over the world except in the United States. Canada and India where the stores remain under the control of UPS.
In 2017, PostNet and AlphaGrapics , American franchising companies active in printing, graphics and shipping, were acquired. In 2019, there are more than 500 centers in Italy, the global network has about 1600 MBE centers, with the PostNet and AlphaGrapics brands the network increases to 2600 stores in 52 countries with more than 10,000 employees with a turnover of 918 million euros . Part of the MBE network is managed directly, but many stores are franchises.
Oaktree Capital Managament , a US company specializing in alternative investment strategies, has purchased 40% of the shares of MBE Worldwide, although the Fiorelli family remains the majority shareholder.
PrestaShop remains Open Source
The CMS entirely designed for ecommerce development is open source and will remain so . Recent changes have involved the development of PrestaShop with the creation of a foundation that will take care of the development of the free project. From version 8 of PrestaShop there will be two versions of the CMS one completely Open Source without any connection to the developer PrestaShop SA and its services such as Addons and a Corporate version managed directly by PrestaShop SA. The change took place before the purchase by MBE and resolves an anomaly. The creation of a foundation could potentially attract several developers and allow a significant growth of the project.
Buying PrestaShop SA
Both PrestaShop SA and MBE are both concentrated in the SME sector. PrestaShop has more than 300,000 e-commerce stores around the world developed with the CMS which are estimated to have produced around 22 billion euros in sales in 2020, while the turnover of PrestShop SA stands at over 20 million euros .
“PrestaShop and its talented team will represent great added value for MBE. Combining 'atoms and bits' will allow us to further differentiate our positioning on the market, thus allowing MBE to become one of the most important global platforms for e-commerce and logistics for businesses ”.
[ Paolo Fiorelli , president and CEO of MBE Worldwide]
The purchase of PrestaShop SA has good conditions , certainly a franchising network is what can be farthest from the current era, a dinosaur of the era of atoms. MBE is not new to the attempt to propose proprietary ecommerce solutions to its customers through its stores, solutions that did not take hold, however, on the one hand because they were obsolete and on the other due to the poor preparation of its commercial affiliates. With the purchase of PrestaShop SA, MBE certainly acquires the skills that in the past did not allow it to emerge in the sector. In light of the Italian digital divide and the European bureaucracy, it could still be a great opportunity for growth, and a response to competition from SaaS platforms such as Shopify in the micro-enterprise sector, the branch that has allowed PrestaShop to compete today in the segment that was busy. from Magento. Everything will depend on the degree of freedom that will be granted to the community and to the agencies that revolve around the corporate CMS project.
Surely as it happened with the Mozilla Foundation before AOL 's purchase of Nescape , at the end of the browser war, open source protects the project from market perspectives, even when the old meets the new.
Author: Loris Modena
SENIOR DEVELOPER
For Ind Loris Modena , owner of Arte e Informatica , he began working in the IT sector in 1989 as a system engineer in charge of the maintenance and installation of IT systems. He started programming for the web in 1997 dealing with CGI programming in PERL and then moving on to programming in PHP and JavaScript. In this period he approaches the Open source world and the management of Linux servers.