Meet the Startup Going Up Against Amazon in the Shipping Wars

Small businesses may never be able to match Amazon's volume. But this startup is helping them get a leg up.

Like many entrepreneurs, Laura Behrens Wu started a business to solve a problem she herself faced--just not right away.

In 2013, when Wu--a German graduate student and tech worker living in San Francisco--launched her online store, selling sustainable handbags, the whole process was relatively seamless. She used Shopify to process her sales and used Stripe for processing payments. The only problem was, her trips to the post office were becoming increasingly frequent and, as such, a major time suck.

"We were making two to three trips to the post office a day," says Wu, 25, who figured she wasn't the only one feeling the pain. "In e-commerce, shipping is such a cost factor and customers expect a fast turnaround with low costs," she says. "So we started to look into the inefficiencies of shipping." That same year, she abandoned her e-commerce shop and by February Shippo, which she co-founded with Simon Kreuz, 28, was in business.

Shippo allows customers to compare prices, routes, and shipping times between private carriers like UPS and FedEx and others so they can get their products out to customers--fast. Today, more than 10,000 customers use the company's API to do everything from purchase shipping services to print labels directly, rather than tediously uploading customer and order data to a carrier's website. Read more

Graham Rapier - Inc. - 9 May 2017