Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have always driven our local economies. But now, more than ever, they are transacting beyond their countries’ borders, competing with the large enterprises on a global stage. About 30% of global trade volumes are attributable to SMEs, and SME trade is growing faster than that of large enterprises. Yet SMEs feel underserved by traditional freight forwarders.
SMEs struggle to understand trade rules and regulations in each country, are unfamiliar with documentation requirements, find cross-border communication fragmented, and are all too familiar with customs clearance delays. Freight forwarding to them is opaque – there is little pricing transparency, status of goods in transit is often not available, and there is lack of visibility on who is actually handling the cargo.
We started Shipa Freight, a digital freight platform, to create a great freight experience for SME customers that addresses these challenges. Shipa Freight enables customers to:
- Get real-time competitive quotes with a full breakdown of pricing and service options across tens of thousands of trade lanes globally
- Place a booking and pay online using the common payment methods in their country
- See the status of their shipments from initial cargo handover to final delivery
- Understand document requirements and collaborate with operators on the creation and handover of key shipping documents
We have found that Shipa Freight’s success hinges on (1) offering a competitive price, (2) providing a reliable service, and (3) delivering convenience and peace of mind. The pricing part is quite complex and where we spend a lot of our efforts, and perhaps a subject for a future post. Reliable service is facilitated by timely collection of documents and information, and centralized communication, both which are facilitated by the platform. And convenience and peace of mind come with the simplicity of the shipping experience and easy access to critical shipping information. We certainly have a way to go to consistently deliver along these lines, but we are getting there.
A bit about our tech. We have a responsive web app built with React, an iOS app and an Android app. All front ends conform to Shipa Freight’s Gateway design system, based on Google’s Material UI. The front ends invoke all application services through a GraphQL interface. Our newer services are implemented in Node JS with MongoDB. Some of our legacy services are MS .NET. The front ends are hosted on AWS. We have interfaces to rate databases and transport management systems of our logistics partners. We’ve integrated marketing and sales automation based around Pardot and Salesforce to maximize customer engagement. We use Intercom for 24×7 chat support. And we use a mix of analytics tools like Google Analytics, HotJar, and Optimizely to understand user behavior. All our data feeds a data lake that drives our data science activities.
Lots more to say but I’ll stop here for now!