Courier service with a personal, evening touch
It was a bad experience with the delivery of an online purchase that led Peter Psyharis to start a business.
“I ordered an Xbox online,” he says. “They left it on my doorstep and it was a really snowy day and the entire thing got covered in snow and ended up getting water damaged.”
It left him thinking, he says. “There has to be a better way to either get a package when you’re home and not have it left at your door to get damaged or stolen or have to go pick it up from a post office,” Psyharis says he thought at the time. “Why can’t we deliver packages in the evening when people are home?”
Now he’s trying to do something about it with the business he cofounded, BoxKnight (Psyharis is also the company’s CEO).
In many ways, BoxKnight operates like a traditional courier. But there are two big differences: Instead of delivering during the day, the Montreal-based startup delivers from 6 to 11 p.m.; and customers schedule their deliveries, within a two-hour window, in advance.
BoxKnight is working with four local retailers, including clothing brands DRPT CO. and Valerie Dumaine and rose-seller Kismet, whose customers have the option to use BoxKnight when they make online purchases.
Retailers pay BoxKnight directly and it’s up to them whether or how they pass those charges on to their customers. It also offers a personal service: customers buying anything online can give the address of BoxKnight’s warehouse (along with a personal identification code) instead of their shipping address. When the packages arrive, BoxKnight will contact the recipient and schedule a delivery that evening, Psyharis says.
The personal service does come with an additional cost. BoxKnight charges a delivery fee of $5, plus $2 per package.
While Psyharis admits not everyone will pay extra for scheduled deliveries, he thinks there are enough people who will that he can build a successful business.
“There’s so many hassles in life that I think spending that little extra money is worth it,” Psyharis says.
When a package arrives at BoxKnight’s warehouse, a text message is sent to the recipients who then pick, via text message, when they’d like it to arrive. Customers also receive an automated message when the driver is on their way.
Texting was the most straightforward way to reach customers, Psyharis says.
“We didn’t want to go the way of forcing people to download an app.”
Those texts are directly connected to a computer program, developed by one of Psyharis’ co-founders, that considers the number of orders, their destinations and the scheduled delivery time to figure out how many drivers are needed to make the deliveries and to plot the most efficient route.
Psyharis says he hopes BoxKnight will be ready to expand to other cities by the fall.
“We don’t want this just to be a Montreal thing, we want this to be Canada-wide as fast as possible,” he says.