Peer-to-peer delivery apps gain momentum
Crowdsourced shipping models popping up as pandemic forces more Canadians to stay home
Olympic gymnast Jackson Payne has been a Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace aficionado for years, but shortly after negotiating a price on whatever he was selling on the platforms, he always encountered a conundrum: getting the item to its new owner.
“It would be a 45-minute to an hour’s drive … and they wouldn’t want to come pick it up and I wouldn’t want to go deliver it,” Payne said.
So when he retired from his athletic career at the end of August, he decided it was time to do something about it.
That something is Deeleeo, an Edmonton-based app that aims to bring convenience and affordability to the courier industry by letting anyone sign up to transport goods.
Deeleeo, which recently had its soft launch, has been used by locals to speedily drop off presents or loan out items to friends and family and by small businesses to get purchases to buyers.
Experts say it’s an opportune time for peer-to-peer or crowdsourced delivery services specializing in non-perishable goods because many Canadians are staying home and such apps allow consumers to send items without a requiring a mask or a trip outdoors.
It’s a reversal from a few years ago,
when similar services were calling it quits, citing low demand and more interest in food delivery. The most high profile courier service to close was Uber Technologies Inc.’s Rush, which operated in San Francisco, New York and Chicago between 2014 to 2018. The company chalked up the closing as a “bold bet” that didn’t work out and refocused on UberEats.
Courier DHL and a group of German design students explored a similar service called Bring Buddy, but it was cancelled seven years ago and the company hasn’t used crowdsourcing since.
Even Walmart considered using customers to drop off U.S. orders, but abandoned the idea.
Others thought crowdsourced deliveries still had potential, but zeroed in on the commercial markets by undercutting postal services and big-name shipping companies with cheaper prices and lower wait times.
Payne insists there is a market for his service because it can get deliveries where they need to go quicker or more cheaply than traditional options.
Small packages going a short distance can be delivered for as low as $9, while bigger items needing to travel hundreds of kilometres can cost $70, he said.
Couriers earn between 75 and 80 per cent of the delivery fee and make premiums for the more items they deliver.
Just as Payne was readying to launch Deeleeo, Uber was reconsidering crowdsourced deliveries again.
Despite its Rush troubles, it launched Uber Connect, a Deeleeo competitor, at the end of May in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Connect likely won’t be the last new crowdsourced delivery option.
A2016 McKinsey study valued the global parcel delivery market at more than $108 billion and said it’s growing so fast that shipping volumes could double by 2026.
While such services are fulfilling an important need during the health crisis, Wendy Cukier, a research lead at both the Future Skills Centre and Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, worries about their affects on the workforce.
Uber and Deeleeo — much like food delivery services — rely on independent contractors and were developed to offer convenience to consumers and a money generator for people out of work or looking to pad their incomes.
The problem with services relying on independent contracting is they often don’t offer stable wages, employment benefits or health insurance, said Cukier.
She wishes services and regulators thought more about how big an impact universal basic income and portable benefits, which move with people as they change jobs or employers, can have on workers and the economy.