“The world’s fastest delivery for the world’s most impatient people” was the tagline Tom Allason, head of local at eBay and founder of Shutl, came up with for the delivery service. Unfortunately the PR team shot it down 18 months ago when Shutl rolled out their speedy courier business in the United States.
In 2003, Allason found a business-to-business delivery company called Ecourier. 4 years later, he came to the realization that there was a real need for extremely fast deliveries from consumers, so in 2008 he started the company, Shutl.
Shutl was acquired by eBay back in 2013 and is best recognized for its work with Argos in the UK. However, with its investment from eBay, Shutl has experienced rapid growth.
While the Internet has been around for nearly twenty years (to the general public), the process of delivering items remained generally unmoved. Allason notes that the process for large multi-national couriers to deliver a product takes time in that they have to pick up items from the main warehouse, take them to the local distribution facility, and then finally deliver them to the consumer.
While the process for multi-national couriers is elongated, Shutl utilizes small local courier companies to help speed up the delivery process, using their existing capacity to speed up delivery times. Allason notes that when a delivery destination is about 10 miles or less, it is usually more cost efficient to deliver the product directly from the company to the consumer.
“Over the last five years the fastest trend in ecommerce has been around multi-channel, has been around convenience. Think click and collect and same-day delivery,” Allason explained. With that, consumers now expect faster deliveries more than ever.
Allason notes that when it comes to taking on companies like Amazon, it’s really about utilizing the technology in order to bring together an already existing infrastructure.
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