By Gugu Lourie
If you about to fly on that business trip but forgotten your passport or need that contract urgently collected and delivered but snowed under at the office, picupBusiness claims it can help help with your dilemma.
A new start-up is offering small, medium or large sized companies a service it says will efficiently speed up collection and delivery of documents and parcels in under 90 minutes. picupBusiness, available on the web, has just come out of stealth mode and could turn the traditional same day courier service industry on its head.
The first thing to know about picupBusiness is that it is an offshoot of picup, an on-demand delivery service that was launched in May to service consumer clients in Cape Town.
Picup is a real-time simple and seamless collection (“picup”) and delivery service for goods (documents, packages, parcels and incidentals) hosted exclusively on WeChat.
Same day collection and delivery was popularised by traditional courier firms, which are expensive and sometimes doesn’t deliver or collect parcel on-time.
picupBusiness is addressing this challenge in a different way.
If you about to fly on that business trip but forgotten your passport or need that contract urgently collected and delivered but snowed under at the office, picupBusiness claims it can help help with your dilemma.
The start-up promises to credit the full fare to the client if the delivery isn’t made within 90 minutes.
“It didn’t take long for us to realise that businesses formed a core part of our target market and we needed a solution that allowed them to place a picup from their PC. While today’s consumer is constantly on the go and a mobile offering on WeChat is the perfect solution, the average business person still does most of their work from a desktop computer,” says Antonio Bruni, Founder & CEO of picup. “And so, the business-friendly, web-browser version of picup was born – picupBusiness.”
Traditional same day deliveries are typically handled by a number of people. Deliveries are usually sent to the depot and orders need to be placed and ready before lunchtime to be delivered that day. A further struggle that courier companies face is that all their vehicles work within set routes every day.
“In order to offer a same-day solution, courier companies need to pull a driver off a route to do one delivery or they need one designated driver doing same-day deliveries, which results in exorbitant costs,” says Bruni.
picupBusiness has over 200 drivers located in and around Cape Town, ensuring they’re ready and waiting to collect parcels within minutes of orders being placed.
“In our mind, same-day delivery means delivery within 90-minutes (traffic dependant) of placing the picup. In today’s world, people need things to be done immediately and we’re helping them achieve that. What’s more, you only have to sign up with picup once, and after that the steps to place a picup are so simple you can do it in under three minutes. This allows people to get back to running their business without having to worry about tedious paperwork or hand delivering a document to get it to the right person on time,” says Bruni.
picupBusiness allows a business to immediately dispatch the closest driver to complete the delivery in the quickest time, and if the delivery isn’t completed within 90 minutes, it’s free. Rates are determined by the mode the user selects (bicycles, motorbikes and cars) along with the distance. The parcel weight becomes irrelevant as long as it can fit within the dimensions of each mode of transport.
Meanwhile, people in the economic capital of South Africa, who have been wondering when this new service will hit the streets of Johannesburg, can expect to spot the blue picup bicycles, scooters and cars in the next few months.
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