Shyp Goes Nationwide By Letting You Comparison-Shop Shipping Services | Hacker News Reader

Shyp Goes Nationwide By Letting You Comparison-Shop Shipping Services

fastcompany.com

62 pointsbitsweet20 comments

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 ...)

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 :)

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 ..)

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

Anyone who has gone through the UPS approval process has either read the TOS and not done this, or failed to read the terms and had their integration rejected by UPS. Been there, done that, lesson learned.

I think what Shyp is doing is absolutely incredible for consumers.

I'm responsible for 100s of shipments per day, and I'm genuinely curious how they got around this restriction, as our order and shipping management system vendor doesn't allow us to rate shop UPS against other carriers (although both the Shippo and EasyPost APIs do allow this, whether directly or simply by providing the information required).

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

So how does Shippo fit into all this? https://goshippo.com/

I don't think it does at all, what are you asking?

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.

Is the Shippo API powering this Shyp app?

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.

From Shippo's homepage:

"Shyp uses Shippo to automatically get rates from multiple carriers, and create shipping labels at the lowest prices.

Shyp accepts orders from their app, and sends shipment information directly to their fulfillment center to be processed, same-day. Weight, dimensions, and other information about the item are then sent to the Shippo API and a shipping label is generated.

Shippo helps power Shyp by providing them with a way to automatically generate discounted shipping labels."

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.

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?

We do not use shippo for this product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com