Shippn — Shop from 10 countries that don't ship to your country.

love the idea, there are some good options for this kind of thing already available. Just a small question..what prevents me from using a host and then having the host go through my stuff? What kind of assurance / insurance is there that guarantees I will receive what I bought?

@nazimahat, this is a great idea! Honestly, I had to do a double-take on the title of this launch, haha. Why would I buy something from a country that doesn't ship to me? Then I answered my own question! Congrats :)

Great idea, the concept should be enforced with A) social verification (will not forward someone's package that has 25 fb friends and a weird profile photo) B) Option for forwarders to only accept packages from reputable online shops

Great product! But what about customs? Can I declare the value of the item that I purchased myself? If so it would be great. Good luck!

Great idea - can't wait to use something like this. Especially as I have seen plenty of firms & launches recently which were US only.

Looks awesome, but I'm stuck in an infinite loop. I am signed-up using Google and confirmed the email. See this screencast:

Great idea! It would make sense to have a "ship now" landing page that lets you define what to ship and who to ship it to, fill in all details and then on "Next" you have to create an account. Also, we have a pretty large office in Stockholm where we already handle logistics, thought about a solution for businesses?

Hi Shippn! Here's a quick brain dump on some issues you are probably already aware of and will most likely run into. Have you put much thought into how credit card companies deal with shipping to addresses that aren't the oners? It is used for fraud prevention. You'll need some good tools for detecting folks using stolen credit and do everything you can to keep them from using your services to stay out of trouble. Tax collection is also an issue. Have you looked at how to minimize tax duplication for your users? I did a quick test to see what your pricing was and since it is based on package size I'm not sure most folks will have that info when trying to guess what package size the online buyer is sending them. You may want to go with a membership plus actual postage fee to encourage frequent loyal usage and just combine packages if they order frequently and pass the savings on to them. Lastly you'll want to find reputable folks to be a 3rd party shipper. They need to have business locations where neighbors won't be annoyed with a million delivery trucks coming by each day, and that the packages aren't likely to be stolen. I would definitely choose providers near shipping UPS, FedEx and DHL hubs to save on costs and time. Be sure to get the all the shippers legal documentation since they are likely to have to deal with a lot of tax and shipping forms - especially for lost or damaged packaging. Hopefully you have a pricing model that will allow you to minimize scammers while rewarding ontime shippers. Look up the history on MailBox Etc on how they franchised before getting bought out by UPS (it is a similar kind of story like how PayPal and e-Bay evolved). If you do this startup well I wouldn't be surprised to see you get bought out by a shipping logistics firm. Lastly change the company holding name from Legrin to Shippn to make things easier later and give more transparency about who you are since you are asking folks to put a lot of trust in you to deliver. Invest in good customer service (Zappos level). Great service idea & best of luck!

I'm assuming the idea here is that you put these people's US address in the ship-to fields so a retailer that doesn't ship international has somewhere to ship it to. But I'm curious how people actually pay for the items they buy if they don't have a US issued Credit card or US based paypal account? I don't think a retailer that only ships domestically would accept an international payment method. I realize people can buy from any country, but assuming US is the example. How does that work?

This is a very interesting problem, and something I would want to use myself as an American living in Vietnam. One thing I don't get though is that everyone trying to solve this problem tries to solve it with "gig economy" based network. Why do it this way? It seems so inefficient and more expensive. It seems to me there are plenty of fulfillment shipping centers that can do this for a fraction of the price, plus the right partnership can give huge volume discounts. As a user, I don't want to worry about whether or not the host shipper can be trusted, I just want the company to take care of it. I don't care how my package gets here, I just want it to get here cost-effectively. The best system I can think of from my user perspective, would be a chrome extension that overlays a button on Amazon, which adds products to my shippn "cart". Then I check out with shippn and 1-2 weeks (or less 😃) later my order arrives. How it gets here is not of concern to me as long as it arrives.

This is very cool, just moved countries and will definitely use this. Just signed up as a host as well. Can't wait to be approved.

Is the product available for all countries? In particular Israel and India? Gonna try it out this week! Good luck!

Looks great, but other shipping options apart from express couriers should be added. Not because I prefer my packages to arrive slower, but because how express couriers treat customs and taxes. I always avoid them as much as I can, so using this service would not be an option at all for me :(

This is a great idea! I hope you are launching in Australia - I constantly have friends there who are looking for products you can either only get in the US, or are lot cheaper here.

How does this compare to the other package forwarding companies? In other words, why should I use Shippn instead of X?

Ahh, this is awesome! I recently signed up for Sprint and saved about $200+ in taxes and fees by renting an address in Portland, OR (0% sales tax) vs Houston, TX (~8.25%) and just paid $17 for the express shipping back to me. I will certainly give this a try when I see an Portland address listed. :)

Looks cool and useful if you live in a third world country or shopping from a shop that doesn't have international shipping. I just use it and buy a sneaker from germany. Lets see how it will going. I will update here :)

great idea, i haven't bought stuff online from the US since moving to Germany as it involves a 2 hour round trip to the zollamt (including a 2 hour weight) to pay custom taxes in person.

It looks like a great service to buy Snapchat Spectacles or Amazon Echo/Google Home 😉

Great idea! Really excited about this.. I might use the service today.. Will update here how it goes!