FedEx Corporation, formerly Federal Express Corporation and later FDX Corporation, is an American multinational delivery services company headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee. It has recently introduced a program to assist small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMB) owners to proliferate their e-commerce operations during the times of the fatal global pandemic.
This program which has formed in integration with the non-profit Accion Opportunity Fund (AOF), the FedEx E-Commerce Learning Lab is geared toward diverse SMB owners, with a focus on women and entrepreneurs of color who have hit harder by the pandemic.
“The program will provide intensive hands-on learning to a cohort of 150 small business owners across the U.S. through a series of workshops and one-on-one coaching by e-commerce experts,” FedEx said in the release. “They will receive free technical support in setting up and maintaining their virtual stores, as well as support with marketing, managing promotions, customer service, managing orders, and fulfilments and product photography.”
The participants of this program will receive a grant of $2,000 along with a series of seminars on advanced e-commerce topics and access to an online learning hub. The hope is to build the relationship between SMB owners and the e-commerce market that grew by 33 percent the last year. Through this program, FedEx believes to connect diverse small businesses with the tools, resources, and experts that can help them navigate online sales and forge a new path to growth. This program will stretch through a period of 5 months and it will start in the month of September. Since the schedule is timed during September, it is coinciding with the holidays, so that the participants have added help with marketing and technical support during that busy selling season.
The learning lab comes at a time of great uncertainty for SMBs, as AOF’s Adriana Eiriz.
“There is this feeling of an unsure future right now,” Eiriz mentioned. “Small businesses are not even sure if taking on any debt is the right thing — even debt that is low-priced or highly subsidized.”
