What is Shipit?
Shipit — Send packages. No couriers. Just people.
Millions of people ship packages daily and all around the world. However, there is a high chance of a sender running into issues of expensive shipping services, delivery delays, and high risks of shipments getting lost or damaged. Customs and postal services may cause a wide variety of troubles ranging from excessive paperwork to outright theft. At the same time those services cannot boast of outstanding efficiency and fast work: sometimes the shipments are delivered behind all reasonable deadlines. Aside from that, governments often charge different shipping fees and taxes inexplicable to the sender.
Commercial courier companies are not perfect as well. It is worth mentioning that courier and parcel delivery services have to employ a lot of people, machinery, and equipment units as well as to take care of insurance policies for their activities. All that leads to more than significant costs that are eventually carried by customers.
Delivery and courier services often cannot ship a parcel directly from point A to point B and are forced to resort to transit hubs which introduce even more threats and risks. Naturally, the increase in number of intermediary delivery and courier companies involved does not lead to increase of the responsibility of each party involved.
Although courier and parcel delivery companies have made our lives easier, they still have not fully addressed any of the questions above. Naturally, in the world of globalization and digitization and given the constant growth of global GDP and retail e-commerce sales, the significance of these issues is going to increase proportionally to the shipping volumes worldwide.
The world around us is rapidly developing and people all around the globe wanting to make things better than they are today may have only one viable option – to shift from the consumption and possession economy to the sharing economy.
Market growth
In spite of current difficulties, the global market of courier and parcel delivery services constantly develops and provides the delivery companies with billions of revenue. The courier and express delivery industry has been growing by annual 1% during the last five years from 2012 to 2017. The IBISWorld experts expect the demand for courier services to continue to increase over the next five years by 2022. This is caused by the growth of customer spending and demand for goods. Many companies are going to turn to air means of shipping in order to secure out on-time deliveries for the customers. There are almost 3 million employees and 600,000 companies on the market. The market size of the industry currently counts with $240 bln. According to the report by Accenture.com, the market of express deliveries is expected to grow from $237,9 bln in 2017 to $343,1 bln in 2020.
The number of start-ups contributing to sharing economy and attracting more investments grows annually. Investor interest rises to new features and possibilities that collaborative consumption can offer. Sharing goods and services, barter, rent makes people reflect not only on what they get but also how they get it. According to TIME Magazine’s visionary article, collaborative consumption is one of 10 ideas that are going to change the world within the next 10 years. It is a new socio-economic model that is going to reshape consumption of services and goods. Although, there are prominent players in some sharing economy industries such as Airbnb in travelling, ZipCar in carsharing, Uber in taxi – the crowd shipping market is still at its very early stages of development.
Having analyzed problems that customers of courier and parcel delivery services usually face, our team came with the idea of Shipit and designed the project’s main concept.
Let people ship your packages.
Shipit a mobile app that connects senders and travelers around the globe and provides them with cost-effective, fast, and reliable solution to deliver packages. Aside from that, it is an excellent tool to earn extra money while traveling. Shipit allows to set new delivery chains, to make complicated processes simpler, and to manage luggage more efficiently. It does not matter where you send your shipment, shipping will still be the most cost-effective and simple!
Shipit is a symbiosis of best ideas and practices of courier, crowdsource and crowdshipping services. We have synthesized the best business practices to create a revolutionary and unique service. Just as Uber and BlaBlaCar have already become a part of our daily lives, Shipit is going to become an irreplaceable tool for shipping items.
It is the first app of its’ kind that uses smart contracts and blockchain as a native tool to make people lives easier all around the world. By implementing blockchain we want to build relations between participants based on transparency and safety, which should be an objective of any system. By integrating cryptowallet, we want to spare the app of any issues and restrictions related to fiat transactions.
Objective of Shipit is to create an alternative platform for express deliveries based on principles of sharing economy, blockchain and crowd shipping.
How It Works
The app is simple and intuitive. You just need to take a picture of an item you want to ship using your smartphone camera, input points A and B of your shipment’s journey, set the size and value of item and the price you are willing to pay for the delivery. The system matches the input data with that of travelers and picks the best matches. Communicate with the candidates, pick the best one, hand off your item and track it upon delivery. Shipit verifies its users and monitors all shipments providing items’ safety. Interactive interface makes the shipping simple and fast. You do not need to worry about making a mistake or missing important details.
Key Features
- No customs charges or taxes, if the item fits green channel requirements.
- Lower probability of theft or damage.
- Shipping to individuals and legal entities.
- Lower costs than when using delivery services.
- Personal communication with delivering travelers.
- No paperwork and bureaucracy.
- Sender does not overpay for brand and promotion.
- Sender’s money is fairly distributed within the system instead of being transferred to corporations.
- Travelers manage their luggage more efficiently.
- Travelers contribute to the world.
Target Market
The Asia-Pacific Region (APAC) has long been a major focus for multinational enterprises, as the supply chains have been going through the process of globalization, and the demand of Western countries for Asian exports has been increasing. As the region shifts from an export-dependent economy to a customer-oriented one, the dynamics of logistics undergo changes as well. Local international supply chains once primarily constituted by dominating air and water freight companies have become a solid network of regional supply chains based on e-commerce. Unlike the US, the APAC market is fragmented and immature and is struggling to cope with huge demand. As a result, many retailers and e-commerce providers have created their own logistics solutions.
Despite the growth in online spending, the domestic supply chains in the Asia-Pacific Region are underdeveloped compared to its export supply chains. Some of the problems that the region is struggling with inadequate warehouse services, fragmented supply chains, poor technology and service, competition based exclusively on prices.
The Shipit team strongly believes that the Asia-Pacific Region is the most promising among the largest and developing markets. According to reports by experts from Accenture, the region’s share in the near future will not only prevail over other regions of The World, but also will strengthen its position in general due to economic growth by 2020.