Vendio Services Inc. announced it has completed its acquisition of the assets of Andale Inc. as part of a deal announced in June. The two companies provide tools and services for eBay sellers and buyers and had been rivals since 1999. Details of the agreement were not disclosed.
Vendio and Andale customers should expect no service changes in the foreseeable future, particularly during the holiday shopping season, according to a press release issued on Tuesday. The company will focus on infrastructure changes and consolidating the back-end processes, and URLs and user-interfaces will remain unchanged at least over the course of the next two to three months.
Vendio CEO Rodrigo Sales said the acquisition has long-term benefits because the two companies had been duplicating efforts in building products and improving features. Sales used the two companies' gallery tools as an example. He said rather than the companies each building the same services, the acquisition now eliminates that duplication of effort so that Vendio can accelerate the rate of product development and feature enhancement. "The long-term benefit to the acquisition is that it will enable the company to innovate much faster," he said.
Sales said the company will continue to consolidate and focus on infrastructure changes to gain efficiencies and said he has yet to consider changes such as pricing. Sales would not comment on whether any additional acquisitions are planned, but said he is looking to grow the business organically and otherwise.
Sales said that with over 75,000 active customers after the acquisition, Vendio is the largest company in the space in terms of number of paying customers. Sellers generate over $1 billion in annual Gross Merchandise Volume through Vendio's Sales Manager ecommerce-management tool.
Ravi Garikipati, former CEO of Andale, is now Vendio's Senior Vice President, Managing Director India Operations. He said in a press release, "The Andale team is eager to contribute our expertise in listing management and research services to the success of Vendio. Bringing our two accomplished companies together enables us to continue serving our customer base while expanding into new areas that capitalize on our combined strengths."
Andale operated country-specific websites in North America, Germany, the UK and Australia, and Vendio now has development teams in the U.S., India and Romania.
Munjal Shah had started Andale in 1999 and had raised millions of dollars in venture capital funding. He left Andale in 2004 and founded Riya, which provides photo face-recognition services. Riya's new shopping service, Like.com, was profiled on Monday in the New York Times.
http://www.vendio.com
http://www.andale.com
