The secret behind Amazon’s delivery service to W. Africa
In a building on West 147th Street in Upper Manhattan, the mail carriers know apartment 1A.
Boxes arrive at all hours, ordered from websites around the world. Throw pillows, diapers, car parts, cellphones, high heels and AirPods pile up in the foyer, but none of the items were bought by the person to whom they are addressed: Arame Wade.
The true recipients are 3,800 miles away.
Every few weeks, Wade stuffs her luggage with goods and hauls them across the Atlantic to the people who actually made the purchases: customers in Dakar, Senegal, in West Africa, who pay her a fee.
Wade, a former car saleswoman, is part of a thriving low-tech solution to a problem that continues to bedevil high-tech shopping in places where mail delivery is unreliable and street addresses are rare: Getting stuff to the people who ordered it.
The roundabout shipping route is an attempt to solve what is known among logistics professionals as the “last-mile issue”: getting imported online goods into Senegal can be fairly smooth, but the final stretch is where things sometimes go awry.
Informal couriers like Wade, 34, are known in Senegal and other Frenchspeaking countries as GPs.
The term, many people say, has its origins in an Air France policy that offered family members of airline employees a reduced airfare called gratuité partielle, or partially free. The GPs would often bring hard-to-find goods home from abroad for friends.
Today, GPs have formed their own cottage industry, charging fees — as little as $8 a pound for some bulk items; more for things like cellphones or computers — that are typically well below what most online retailers charge for shipping.
Despite a rush to capitalize on growing internet use in Africa and other places with similar infrastructure challenges, scaling e-commerce is not always easy.
Jumia, a Pan-African e-commerce startup once hailed as the “Amazon of Africa” that tried to use local expertise to solve the last-mile conundrum, began closing operations in almost half a dozen countries in the past few months.
Amazon ships goods to Senegal and 128 other countries, where it assumes the risk and responsibility for deliveries, much as it does in the U.S., according to the company.
But the shipping companies that Amazon uses cannot always provide doorstep delivery. The retail giant is making strides. In the Himalayas, for example, it has teamed up with small businesses to deliver directly to customers’ doors.
Still, many people in West Africa choose the underground network, simply because they prefer to use someone they know.
GPs often operate on slim profit margins. They hunt for low-priced tickets: up to $1,300 is viewed as acceptable for a round-trip flight from New York to Senegal. But to retain customers, many of the couriers continue to fly even when prices spike during the holidays, and the economic math becomes precarious.