Please describe what the company does…

Our mission is to help ecommerce businesses to be more successful.

We do this by handling all elements of parcel delivery on their behalf, from negotiating the best prices with couriers, to providing an easier, streamlined website to book parcel collection on.

We also have the simplest API in the industry, for people who want to integrate shipping into their apps, and we’re working on apps for popular carts and marketplaces too. We also handle all delivery issues so that businesses can focus on making sales and not tracking parcels.

What problems does it solve?

We aim to reduce the time, money and effort involved in delivering parcels to customers. We don’t reckon that many business owners get into ecommerce because they enjoy dealing with parcel delivery.

We let them outsource it to us so that they can focus on getting other elements of their business right. 

Is this a crowded market? 

We have a few competitors in the parcel delivery market, mainly parcel brokers and parcel comparison engines. We take a different approach and focus on adding value through service and technology.

Our focus on technology means we offer swift integration into our customer’s sales channels and generally make sending lots of packages each day as simple and painless as possible. 

What are your goals?

ParcelBright’s goal is to provide world-class parcel delivery to e-commerce businesses of all sizes.

We hope to ensure that even the smallest business are able to provide Amazon-level service to their customers (at no additional cost to the business). 

What are the biggest challenges you face?

Scalability is a big challenge for us, like many tech startups. We’ve grown very quickly and have had to focus on constantly improving our systems to ensure that we could cope with the growing amount of business we were handling.

Being a startup, we’re still developing these practices, so we work to make sure every customer experiences a full concierge service.  

How will you make money?

We make a small amount of money from each parcel sent via ParcelBright.

That said, because our customers send so many parcels, we’re able to negotiate super low rates, meaning we’re still a lot cheaper than going directly to the courier.

Who is in your team?

The team is lead by two co-founders, Carlos Vilhena and Daniel Lipinski, plus a set of developers, operations experts, marketers and an exceptional customer service team.

Customer service is our biggest team, because we promise to solve customer queries within 20 minutes.

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years’ time?

We have already proven that we’re a disruptive force within the parcel delivery industry – people are leaving shipping providers who have been around for 15 years to use our service (which is less than two years old).

We’re certain that within two years we will be the go-to providers of parcel delivery for UK businesses.

We’re going to achieve this by keeping our own expectations for our offering very high.

ParcelBright Shipping API already allows developers to send parcels from within their apps and we have plugins for Shopify and Magento coming soon, so we’re expecting to grow as we develop the technology to help even more businesses.

Other than your own, what are your favourite websites / apps / tools?

Our business was built using the lean methodology.

We use all the ubiquitous tools like Google Analytics and Google Drive, but we couldn’t work without analytics package Mixpanel and SEO package Moz.

Slack and Skype helps us stay on the same page when staff are working remotely, and Trello is what we use for project management.