
Shyp Goes Nationwide By Letting You Comparison-Shop Shipping Services - bitsweet
https://www.fastcompany.com/3064387/startup-report/shyp-goes-nationwide-by-letting-you-comparison-shop-shipping-services
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piron_t
I sent 3 boxes (same size) to a friend, the estimate price was $95 + 25 of
shipping, the total price I paid was $248.36, even if they had all the
measurements/weight within the app. They split my package in 3 and made me pay
full price. (When you enter the weight, they don't say it's 50lb max) so they
send 3 shipments (they could have done 2 instead of 3, but I guess the guy who
packages my stuff was lazy and also entered different LxWxH for the exact same
boxes). I contacted the support and got a refund of $60ish. The price you see
in the app should be the price you'll pay, not +200ish % ... (Again, they have
a picture + all the measurements/weight ...)

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kevingibbon
thanks for the feedback. With this new label product you can package your
items yourself and print the labels. You get a final price in app/web before
purchase.

With our pickup/packaging business there is no way to give a price up front.
Only to give an estimate based on the information we receive. There are too
many variables that go into the packaging process (padding, re-arranging
items, multiple boxes etc). Something that I would love to be perfect on but
its a very hard problem.

We typically split items into multiple boxes for safety or to reduce the cost
of the overall shipments. There are some very high oversize fees from the
carriers that we try to avoid as much as possible.

I hope you will give this new product a try :)

~~~
piron_t
If you add a low/high price estimate, I'll probably give it a new try.

You can also probably add a "Is this item fragile" as an option to add less or
more padding.

Also I send 3 boxes of the exact same size, it would be great in your app to
be able to duplicate items (I had to create one big package by adding the
height and weight all together, was too lazy to create 3 different ones, or 2
in a extra large and 1 in a large)

I sent an email to the support and got refund a bit. (all the boxes I shipped
were the same size, but I don't know why they were slightly different for all
of them in the confirmation email I received ..)

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kevingibbon
I really wish it was that easy. We have tested a bunch of different things and
there is no solution that works 100% of the time. For example.. there is no
standard fragile item. A fragile item could be 2" of padding or could be 10"
of padding.

The #1 most important thing is that the item arrives safely. #2 is reducing
the price our customer pay. We even have machinery to create custom on-demand
boxes to .1 of an inch so we don't ship air.

Starting today..For customers that are very price sensitive they can package
their items, not pay the $5 pickup and still be able to use our great UX/price
comparison technology.

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rconti
Excellent. I can't get over how hard this information has been to come by in
the past.

It's always a ridiculous guessing game of LxWxH with penalties over Y
dimensions total, with weight and shipping speed as confounding factors.

Then the calculus changes totally if you manage to fit the item into a
slightly smaller box.

You have to juggle 3+ websites, entering a bunch of information that shouldn't
really be relevant, to get to a cost number.

Then you go to ship something and the cost STILL is totally different from
what the website said it would be.

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adamfeldman
According to the UPS Developer Kit's guidelines for the UPS Rating API[1] (the
API used for getting shipping rates):

    
    
      Unapproved business models/usages
      • Display of UPS rates side by side with competitor rates
    

How does Shyp get around this restriction?

[1]: (page 25)
[https://www.ups.com/media/en/UPS_dev_kit_user_guide.pdf](https://www.ups.com/media/en/UPS_dev_kit_user_guide.pdf)

~~~
hayksaakian
it ticks me off when pedants run to the terms of service/etc. to undermine
something exceptional.

if you're big enough, or influential enough you can negotiate your own terms
of use for any API or any service.

if you're small, then they probably won't even notice your usage.

shyp is not a weekend hackathon project. While it's certainly possible they're
blatantly violating terms and hoping they don't get caught, that seems
unlikely for a venture backed startup.

~~~
ecommerceguy
Actually, I was wondering the same thing (circumventing TOS).

>Exceptional How? Shyp is nothing new. These services have been around for
ages (Pitney Bowes, more recently Stamps.com, more recently than that
Shipstation, Ordoro, the list is fairly extensive) and these terms have been
around for just as long. If you want to use UPS in your app, better get used
to playing by their rules. I bet we see a change very soon in the way Shyp
presents pricing to the end user.

>If you're big enough... eBay and Amazon both do NOT show side-by-side cost
comparisons for shipping services. Neither do ANY of the established "apps".
Big enough for you?

>Small Shyp is below the radar as of until right about now.

As for the execution of the app itself. Why print an estimated delivery range
(Fedex 1-6 days) when the exact date is available through API? Sometimes Fedex
Ground is cheaper but a day slower. Price of delivery isn't everything (Prime
has proven that abundantly).

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retox
This is an advert, right? Why has it been on the front page for hours, YC
funded?

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kordless
So how does Shippo fit into all this?
[https://goshippo.com/](https://goshippo.com/)

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mylifeisshan
Hi, Shan from Shippo here! We power applications like this by helping them
connect to multiple shipping carriers from one API to compare rates, print
labels, track shipments etc. Through the combined volume we get through the
platform we also help businesses get volume discounts from carriers.

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howardjs
Is the Shippo API powering this Shyp app?

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kevingibbon
For this new product, no. We use a ton of different technologies to make
different parts of our business work. We prefer to focus on solving consumer +
smb pain points vs owning the entire stack ourselves.

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gumby
I wonder how their model scales since after all this time they haven't even
expanded into Silicon Valley. I assume it only works with the density of a
small to medium sized city like San Francisco.

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swang
so shippo lists shyp as a company/partner that uses their backend. does this
mean shyp has moved away from shippo or that this is the resulting product
built on top of shippo?

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kevingibbon
We do not use shippo for this product.

