On-demand logistics startup Cubyn have just landed $7 million Series A funding which will be used to strengthen the company’s leadership position in France, launch operations in new European cities, scale acquisition and consolidate the management team. This is on top of their €1.1 million 2016 seed funding.
The Cubyn proposition is that you don’t need to pack a parcel, you just book a collection and they come within a scheduled two hour window, collect the goods, pack them and ship them to your customer. You can forget about having to order and stock packaging material or even the need for a packing table, once they collect your items they take care of everything needed to get the item safely to the end customer. They do all this for €1.00 per parcel and reckon they can also save clients up to 50% on their shipping costs. Merchants can then track their order, from warehouse to wrapping, to shipping, to delivery.
Cubyn already have integrations with Magento, Prestashop, Shopify and WooCommerce. Earlier this year they secured a partnership with Priceminister (the French Rakuten marketplace) in a move to lay the foundation for its expansion to new markets.
The company forecasts over 3x year-on-year growth for 2017. Since inception, Cubyn has processed over half a million shipments, and in the first half of 2017, it has already processed more shipments than in the entire past year.
There are many many couriers out there for online retailers to choose from offering varied levels of service but essentially they all do pretty much the same thing which is to pick up a wrapped and labelled parcel and deliver it to the end customer within a set time frame with a certain level of insurance and tracking or delivery confirmation. Cubyn aren’t setting up as a courier, but as the middle man between your warehouse and the courier.
Of course you’ll still need to pick your orders, but taking the packing out of the equation is an interesting proposition. Would you trust someone to collect a couple of dozen (or hundreds) of relatively similar items and send the right one to the right customer? A certain level of identification would certainly be needed for each product but that needn’t be a desperately onerous procedure – if you use Amazon FBA you’ll already be accustomed to ensuring that your products are bar coded appropriately for identification purposes.
Where Cubyn will get interesting is for sellers in categories such as antiques where items aren’t in boxes or shrinkwrap from the factory. We’ve not seen the service in the UK yet (although they’re preparing to launch) but it’s one we’ll watch with interest.
2 Responses
I would like to see this service cater for the many, not the few.