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Comment by frankdenbow | Hacker News Reader

Looks interesting. We are dealing with finding better shipping prices for international shipments on shirts and what we have found is that distributors that ship really high volume are able to negotiate better rates. Does Shippo have the ability to take advantage of the scale as the site increases in shipments? How do you differ from EasyPost?

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Hi frankdenbow, it's great to hear from you. My favourite point of differentiation between us and all existing shipping startups is that we're building a database that aims at integrating all existing courier service not only the 4 big ones (FedEx, UPS, TNT, DHL). The main thought behind our concept is that the small local courier services mostly offer much more competitive prices than the big 4 ones. However, they are difficult to find and compare and most people don't bother searching. At the same time we're negotiating with our courier services to get discounts because of economics of scale. Right now, our discounts are not very high yet. But as traffic increases we'll be able to go back to the courier services and negotiate better rates. That's the goal!

Don't understand your negotiated prices apply to my shipments? I noticed that user is requested to create account at respective carrier. Could not use it since the server ajax is not responding. PS - Request URL:https://goshippo.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?from-dd=Orange%... Request Method:GET Status Code:500 Internal Server Error

I'm sincerely sorry about the server problems. We received an overwhelming response from the HN community today (thanks!) and the server became quite slow because of that. We didn't expect that and were unprepared with our MVP. Yes, depending on the courier service we're sometimes able to pass on our discounts.

the problem is you need to link local couriers and aggregate shipments at hubs nearby each one to make international shipments reasonable for small volume. there are a couple of companies trying to do this and provide one outward facing shipping brand, but navigating political environments, building the tech to tie it together and getting to volume levels that make this all possible is tough.

Hi dsugarman, in the long term we want to be able to connect the local courier service seamlessly the way you described it. This would offer really competitive prices but as you mentioned it is a quite difficult task. That's why we've been focussing on local courier services first that deliver cross border. I'm talking about services such as DPD or GLS in Europe.

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