Biz Buzz: Shippingcart woes
The past five months have been nothing short of torture for many extroverted people who were forced by the pandemic to stay indoors.
Thankfully, a lot of them were able to take refuge—albeit fleeting, at times—in the comfort provided by the phenomenon of online shopping.
Thanks to both small and large portals (like Lazada and Shopee), many Filipinos were able to satisfy their needs, from basic to unnecessary purchases, and have them delivered safely to their front doors a few days later.
Luckier still were some Filipinos who had the wherewithal to go online shopping overseas, like on Amazon in the United States, and use cargo forwarding services which would, for a fee, accept deliveries of their US orders at a US warehouse and forward them to the Philippines where they would arrive at the residence of the buyer seven to 10 days later.
One such player in this field is the popular ShippingCart service of LBC, which had been running a tight ship for a couple of years now, with their forwarding service to the Philippines from warehouses in California and London. Everything was going well ... until the coronavirus pandemic happened.
No thanks to a surge in online orders from the United States from local shoppers, LBC Shippingcart’s Bay Area warehouse was soon filled to the brim with deliveries while their local staffers struggled to cope with the volume of items (all of which needed to be measured for volume and weight, stored while waiting for the clients’ other orders to arrive, then tagged, packed and shipped).
Naturally, the situation was aggravated by the need to ensure the safety of workers earlier during the lockdown in California, even as the company doubled its local workforce and began operating on a 24hour basis.
Despite this, the situation quickly deteriorated, prompting the company’s CEO Dino Araneta to pen a long letter to clients acknowledging that “the quality of Shippingcart’s service for the past few months has been frustrating and unsatisfactory.”
“Delayed processing, unanswered customer support queries, extended delivery timelines—this is not what ShippingCart stands for, and is certainly not the quality of service our longtime customers are used to,” he said. “For this, we are truly sorry for letting you down.”
To remedy the situation, the company implemented a moratorium on accepting deliveries for the first two weeks of August, to allow their US staffers to reduce the backlog.
But lo and behold, even this proved insufficient as three Shippingcart workers contracted COVID19 recently, forcing the company to close down their warehouse operations for sanitation and disinfection.
Because of this, ShippingCart extended the moratorium on accepting deliveries by another few days, until Aug. 18, the company said in another letter to clients. The good news is that they can start accepting parcels by Aug. 19, Wednesday, barring any unforeseen circumstances.
Thankfully for loyal clients, the company’s UK operations remain open and can still ship orders from Europe. But the bulk of their business is from the United States, and their logistics industry rivals have taken notice. The question now is ... can ShippingCart recover lost ground? Abangan!
—DAXIM L. LUCAS
Digital battleground
The scale of the unfolding pandemic is incalculable in many ways but there are some hard numbers when we consider the shift to cashless.
After Paymaya reported transaction gains in the multiples, its rival Gcash—backed by Ayala’s Globe Telecom and Jack Ma’s Ant Financial—saw a 280percent surge as of July.
As such, Gcash said transaction volume went over P100 billion versus P28 billion last year.
Financial technology companies, after all, are at the forefront of this new digital battleground.
For a growing number of people, digital transactions are a faster and, considering the times, the safer option.
Similar to its rivals, Gcash saw more volume in credits for calls or mobile internet, remittance, money transfer, bills payment, QR payments, online transactions, cashin and disbursements.
Gcash president Martha Sazon, who took the helm at Gcash starting June, called the growth a “reflection that Gcash is a formidable and reliable ally of the Filipino people in the collective fight against COVID19.”
This push for more convenience is also good for the company’s bottom line through its operator Mynt.
As lockdowns were imposed in the country starting March, Globe saw losses from its investment in Mynt shrink to P426.7 million from over P700 million last year, its latest financial report showed.
Email us at Biz Buzz@inquirer.com.ph. Get business alerts and a preview of Biz Buzz the evening before it comes out. Text ON INQ BUSINESS to 4467 (P.250/alert)