Overview

Product Description

Shipbeat was a unified and developer-friendly API for shipping that instantly enabled businesses to do shipments online. Shipbeat offered multi-carrier management for e-commerce companies via a simple shipping API.

Quick Stats

2014

Started in

Aug, 2016

Closed in

11-50

Employee (s)

$1,590,000

Total Raised

Why did Shipbeat fail?

Follow This Question - 0

Evan Lee

Updated on 16 Aug, 2017

Scaling Problems

Logistical Setup

Shipbeat was company offering a shipping API that <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/shipbeat/ target=" _blank"="" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/shipbeat/ target=" _blank"="" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/shipbeat target=" _blank"="" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/shipbeat" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/shipbeat" target="_blank">attempted</a> to solve the parcel delivery problems that many small to medium-sized e-commerce businesses faced. Shipbeat essentially aggregated services of leading parcel delivery companies, such as UPS, Fedex, Royal Mail, Deutsche Post, and DHL etc., to help businesses streamline the logistics of shipping and to give their customers all of the delivery options they desired.In a <a href="https://medium.com/entrepreneurial-laundry/shipbeat-post-mortem-c0545780c73f target=" _blank"="" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://medium.com/entrepreneurial-laundry/shipbeat-post-mortem-c0545780c73f target=" _blank"="" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://medium.com/entrepreneurial-laundry/shipbeat-post-mortem-c0545780c73f" target="_blank">postmortem</a>, Shipbeat's former CEO Kenneth Svenningsen detailed the reasons why he believed &nbsp;the company ultimately shut down.Svenningsen explained that Shipbeat had difficulties with its logistical setup, because it relied on parcel carriers as partners. It took Shipbeat more than a year to get a shipping agreement with PostNord (largest carrier in DK) and took way too long to come to market with the full value proposition. The company could only competitively serve very small customers as a result.Svenningsen also wrote that there were several major scalability issues with their business model.&nbsp;The first issue was that each new new geographic market required integrating a new set of carriers, and developing those partnerships took a long time.&nbsp;In addition, in every new market, Shipbeat started with almost zero shipping volume. For example, having a large marketshare in Denmark did not make Shipbeat important for large German carriers.&nbsp;Finally, Shipbeat also suffered from the difficulties of logistics in general– Svenningsen said, "making changes (even minor) to a business critical process in your operations happens with caution. In many cases, it requires changes for the carrier (manual change of account setup etc), the customer (tech, warehouse, customer service) and maybe even an external warehouse (3rd party logistics)."

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Investors - 3

Funding Rounds - 1