A new online company Sendle.com is aiming to disrupt Australia’s postal monopoly by unlocking door-to-door parcel delivery services for consumers.
The online booking system provides a simple posting experience for both sender and receiver and lets users choose who’ll pay for delivery – perfect for online marketplaces such as eBay, Gumtree and Trading Post.
Sendle estimates between 30-40 million parcels are sent between Australians each year, and collectively we are wasting millions of hours travelling to and queuing up at the local post office.
“Much of our current postage system was built hundreds of years ago and doesn’t address the needs of today’s consumers. The monopoly services and traditional postage models that we’ve become accustomed to are time consuming, inconvenient and outdated,” says Sendle co-founder and CEO James Bradfield Moody. “With Sendle, we’ve had the opportunity to rethink package delivery, building an efficient and easy to use service that means Australians never have to line up to send a parcel again.
“Thanks to e-commerce, we currently have millions of parcels delivered to suburbs all around Australia, but the delivery vehicles often return empty-handed,” says Moody. “Sendle gets a great deal by using the idle capacity in these networks to pick up parcels from the consumer’s doorstep.”
Sendle is backed by a number of investors including the NRMA. “Many companies are focussed on delivery for e-commerce,” says NRMA’s general manager of strategy and innovation Michael Pastega. “What we love about Sendle is that they have focused on solving the first mile of parcel delivery, which is the most important thing for consumers.”
Sendle ultimately has global ambitions, with an eye on the eight billion parcels that are sent between consumers every year. “Our priority is to sort out parcel delivery in Australia first – we all have better things to do with our time than stand in line,” says Moody.
