Introducing Shipwell: Helping every business ship freight as well as Amazon
Wherever you are, right now, take a look around. Just a casual glance around you.
Over 80% of everything you see was on a truck at some point. Freight shipping is a gigantic industry, one that employs more than 5% of the United States and generates over $900 billion a year. Despite this, most of it is still incredibly manual, and the process for quoting, booking, and tracking trucks usually requires dozens of phone calls, emails, and faxes.
Everyone we know who’s ever worked in or dealt with freight shipping has more than their fair share of grudges and frustrations, from spending too much time every day getting quotes to missing a child’s baseball game to wait for a truck that was still 300 miles away. These problems aren’t isolated to small companies. Large companies face them too, and the stakes are even higher. It’s not uncommon for companies to lose a million dollars a day when a factory or oil rig has to shut down waiting for a critical shipment to arrive.
Only a few large industry leaders, like Amazon and Walmart, have undertaken the investment necessary to turn their shipping operations into a competitive advantage — and they’re only getting better. Everyone else has customers demanding better shipping options and more visibility, and they simply can’t keep up.
We built Shipwell to be the easiest, most automated way for any business to ship anything anywhere.
Shipwell connects shippers (businesses that ship freight), brokers (third parties that manage freight), and carriers (truckers that haul freight) into one platform for faster quoting, dispatching, tracking, and communicating.
Shippers and brokers can manage all of their freight in an easy-to-use online platform, without the grunt work usually associated with freight shipping. Shipwell lets them get multiple quotes, book instantly, and track all of their shipments in real-time. They receive notifications if there’s something noteworthy about a shipment and can choose to share those notifications directly with their customers too.
We’ve integrated via APIs, ELD partnerships, and our native mobile app into over 100 carrier fleets, which represent nearly 500,000 trucks across the US and covers everything from owner operators and small fleets all the way to some of the biggest names in the industry, like Fedex and UPS.
Freight brokers and third-party logistics companies (“3PLs”) are first-class citizens in Shipwell’s platform, which sets us apart from other startups in the space that are actively trying to disrupt them. While we’ve successfully shipped for hundreds of businesses directly, we’ve also helped our 3PL partners book freight on behalf of major brands including Samsung, Shell, and Dasani.
One of our earliest customers, Lumi, is a startup that makes custom packaging for e-commerce businesses. They used to spend 10 hours a week getting freight quotes through multiple emails, phone calls, and websites, but as their business started to scale, this manual work became unmanageable. By using Shipwell, they were able to cut that down to just 2 hours a week and provide their customers with a better shipping experience.
Right now, we’re making it easy to ship, track, and manage freight on trucks. That’s not a small feat, but our ability to automate the freight shipping experience opens up a world of possibilities. It will allow us to build towards a world with complete transparency into a shipment’s price, transit time, and status. By knowing where freight capacity is and how it compares to demand, Shipwell will be able to automatically optimize and tighten supply chains across multiple modes of transportation.
We’re Shipwell, and we believe that every business should be able to ship well. If you’d like to learn more or sign up, you can find us at shipwell.com.
Originally published at www.shipwell.com.