This essentially means that in order to ensure their item is delivered, a customer might sometimes have to remain in the same place for the entire day. Depending on what service they’re using, they may not even be able to track their parcel or get hold of the courier to find out when it will arrive.
However, with Deliver 2 Me, which aims to be a convenient delivery solution, uses geo-location services (already used in apps like uber) to avoid the need for specific street delivery addresses. This means customers can pick a time, a date and they don’t even need to be at a recognized street address.
“Deliver 2 Me is the next logical step in Wumdrop’s journey,” says Hartley. “We started this business because we believed it was ridiculous that people couldn’t get local packages at the exact time and date that they wanted, and were beholden to the back office mechanics of arcane delivery services.”
The service was tested during December 2016 to a tourist in Table Mountain, a surfer on Blouberg Beach, and a hipster moving between Long Street and Mzoli’s requiring a location change.
The Cape Town based company, which has been described as ‘Uber for deliveries’, has been on something of a hot streak since its inception, snagging the 2015 MTN App Of The Year Award and racking up around 33 000 subscribers to its service.
“Fairly soon after starting Wumdrop it became apparent to us that the very concept of addresses was one of the biggest inhibitors of getting packages to individuals accurately,” Hartley says. “So for the last 18 months we’ve been driving at a scalable solution to deliver to people, not places.”