Valk Solutions, a leading provider of cloud-based, omnichannel retail commerce and ERP in the Benelux, has acquired Countr, a global cloud POS and sales solution for retail, hospitality and public transport. This acquisition enables Valk Solutions to offer a broad range of services, both domestically and internationally – serving new market segments and geographies.
Wide range of services and geographies
Countr has a wide range of cloud-based capabilities geared towards (amongst others) the hospitality sector, including kitchen management, waiter handhelds, table management and inventory control. Since the lockdowns began, Countr has added table ordering, take-away, pickup (Click & Collect) and delivery services (Click & Ship-from-store). Further, across all sectors and segments served by Countr, multiple currencies and tax configurations are available. Multi-language configurations are supported in Dutch, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Icelandic and Norwegian. Combining these capabilities with Valk Solutions’ scale and expertise enables rapid deployment of new solutions beyond domestic borders and into new markets globally.
New markets and opportunities
By combining the strengths of both companies, the overall proposition for customers and partners becomes stronger – bringing tangible benefits in technical capabilities and quality of offering.
“Countr is a state of the art international online sales platform to be hosted in any cloud such as Amazon, Azure or Google. It is extremely flexible and scalable based on the newest technology, entirely hardware independent and running on all devices, even a smartwatch. The Countr platform has been load-tested to easily handle millions of international sales transactions per day. We are thrilled about this strategic extension of our portfolio, to be branded ‘Countr International – powered by Valk Solutions’”, says Robert Valk, founder and owner of Valk Solutions.
“Becoming part of Valk Solutions is an exciting step in Countr’s journey. Our clients will benefit from additional services and our partners will gain access to Valk Solutions’ capabilities. Most importantly, we join forces with a forward-thinking and trustworthy player in the retail software market who shares our vision for open, accessible, extensible and flexible software solutions. Powered by Valk Solutions we will continue to realise our goal of opening up the international retail market”, says John Staunton, co-founder and CTO of Countr.
‘Countr International – powered by Valk Solutions’ is a unique proposition for high volume retail with 1.000 or more stores worldwide. Supporting over 35 international payment solutions and compliant with local VAT regulations and tax policies Countr relieves global retail players from the burdens of POS software legacies. Countr brings sales together across all countries, platforms and devices seamlessly connecting by API with Microsoft 365 or SAP or similar large retail ERP environments. Countr supports worldwide integration of stores and webshops such as Woocommerce, Shopify, OpenCart or custom webshops. Countr by default supports Click & Collect, Click & Reserve and Click & Ship-from-store.
On our way to the future
The whole Countr team stays on board in this acquisition and will form a new team within the Valk Solutions company under the inspiring leadership of John Staunton. Domestically Countr will contribute to Valk Solutions’ growth strategy offering dedicated services for the hospitality sector. International markets in which Countr allready head-started will be further developed. In particular large retail will be addressed with a unique Countr proposition freeing clients to sell anywhere, anytime and anyhow.
About Countr
Countr is a platform of sale solution, built on the principles of modularity, scalability and flexibility in transaction orchestration. Simply put, Countr ensures business owners can sell to their customers any time, any place, via any channel. The mission of Countr is to provide POS services via open APIs, enabling partners to easily connect and expand its POS offerings. Even today there are hardly any POS solutions offering open and accessible software. Most POS providers in the market still struggle with the concept of an ‘open API’. Countr supports an app store for all new connections to for example Mollie, Uber Eats, Lightspeed and Obur. Countr is self-onboarding, easy to use and charged per transaction. It runs as a native application or progressive web app (PWA) allowing offline service in problematic internet areas.
About Valk Solutions
Valk Solutions serves retail clients in food, do it yourself, fashion, convenience, beauty, pets, toys and books. Its primary product range is ASPOS, acronym for Advanced Sales Platform of Omnichannel Services. Annually ASPOS handles 3 billion of retail sales revenues originating from brick and mortar stores as well as webshops and marketplaces. In addition to point of sale services, loyalty and webshops ASPOS provides for order management, fulfilment, product information management and business intelligence. Valk Solutions adopts a radically omnichannel approach, centralising all data in the managed cloud and real-time disclosing it to a suite of applications of Valk Solutions itself or third parties. Over the years ASPOS has evolved towards the largest online retail platform in the Benelux.
