CamelBlog

It was November in 2014 straight after the MENA ICT forum in Amman. I was inspired & wanted to be involved in this booming E-commerce industry in the MENA region. I went on holiday to London to visit a friend & I stayed in his flat. The second morning, my friend was bragging on how he sold his snowboard on Ebay within a day. He then showed me a website on how he was going to send his snowboard to his buyer. It took three minutes to book a pickup parcel delivery service. I was impressed & inspired. Then it clicked. This is how I can harness the booming E-commerce sector in the MENA region. Being part of it by solving & handling the shipping issues, making it so simple & convenient while saving ordinary people money. So I headed back to Amman, commissioned a local developer to create the platform I had in Mind. A month after I bumped into an old friend I haven’t seen in years, he was living abroad, he was also excited about this region. I mentioned my project. 

He also had faced a few issues with trying to ship some parcels before. Boom! I found my co-founder. CamelShip was born. In the end my objective is to harness the e-commerce sector  in the MENA region not to compete with in it, by solving & handling an inevitable problem as this sector grows within this region.

If you’re an online retailer in the MENA region, you most definitely faced hassles with shipping.

Shipping is hard and costly; for many reasons:

Trade License required

Deposit required

Months to integrate courier APIs

Bad API Documentation

High price variability

Lack of transparency

No body is solving this.

The small businesses we speak to everyday voice their frustration!

No definite business [shipping] solution for marketplace industries

Let’s not forget the staggering amount of social sellers who sell on Instagram and WhatsApp in the region. These sellers don’t have a shipping-shopping solution.

As a proud UAE startup which partnered with other startups to solve the shipping problem we must acknowledge that the journey is long to achieve our vision but slowly we get there.

Ecommerce in the UAE alone is at $5b this year and growing at CAGR 15%.

In the United States, WhatsApp has never been widely spread. This is due to the fact that American Telcoms charge nothing for SMS texts. The American ecosystem remains largely a text-based one.

Coming from the US, we’ve been aware that that WhatsApp is a major communication platform in emerging markets, including the UAE. But upon further immersion, we’ve been astounded by the many ways WhatsApp is being used for facets of daily life. Be it personal, business, romance, family or even customer service, it’s undeniable that WhatsApp is part of hourly life here.

We are now happy to announce that we “glocalized” our service to allow our customers to receive a quote through WhatsApp!

Now you can WhatsApp 05 5557 4838 to get a Quote!

Forbes Magazine Middle East has published a list of the 25 promising startups in the UAE and CamelShip has been named one of them.

The hard work never stops but we are glad to be recognized as an element of the Ecommerce ecosystem in the UAE. Our mission is to make shipping easier and simpler. We sit on the Forbes list along with two amazing startups in the shipping & Ecommerce space: ShopGo and Fetchr. We’re honored to be part of the Emirates ecosystem.

We’re committed to our vision of being the MENA Shipping API for Ecommerce. Stay tuned for more updates!

Generally, parcel is known to be a package consisting of the address and name of the beneficiary with the purpose to be directed through the delivery facility. Almost everyone working in other places or countries sends a package, known as parcel, at certain point to another.

When sending a package or a parcel, it is very ideal for the sender to find the cheapest transport rate available.  It is also a big deal for the sender to take advantage of discount for a parcel delivery.

Guidelines for packaging parcels

• You must protect your goods against the damage that it might get while being delivered or transported.

• You must also protect the other customers parcel. You can be responsible or liable for the damage that your inadequate packaging causes to other parcel.

• Protect the courier delivery employees and equipment’s against damage and injuries.

Internal Packaging

Having a strong external and internal packaging protects your parcel against some damages. Here are some of the materials that might help you in packaging your parcel easily:

• Handy Bubble Wrap • Polychips • Cardboard • Rolled paper • Polyethylene foam

How to easily pack a parcel?

Here are some ways to easily pack your parcels for delivery:

• Know the things that you need to pack first.

• Choose the appropriate box where all the things that you’ll send will be put.

• Wrap the items that you’ll send using a protective material.

• Place things in the box accordingly and organized them to avoid some damages and to stop it from moving.

• Use a high quality tape in sealing the box. Make sure that the edge of the box is also wrapped around with tape.

• If you are going to use a used box in packaging the things that you will send, make sure that you will remove all the other details that are not appropriate.

• Address the package or parcel according to the requirements of your chosen courier delivery company, whether it is international courier or local.

Discounts

Of course discounts are very important to the sender of the parcel.  Here are some of the ways that you might want to apply when you are going to send a parcel to your family & friends:

• Your parcel is normally weighted before the delivery to know the price that you are going to pay. Make sure that you things are packed well to avoid extra charges.

• Every cent is very important, if you’ll send a single parcel, make sure that all the things that you want to send to your family is inside the parcel.

• The fee of parcel is based on kilo, make sure that it will reach the minimum kilo at the same time all things that you want to send must be placed inside your parcel.

vIn December 2014, I was traveling from San Francisco back home to spend christmas holidays with my family. Knowing that this winter was particularly colder than previous ones, I wanted to make sure that I have my winter clothes handy. The problem was my winter clothes box was at my good friend’s flat in NYC. I thought to myself, it’s easy, I’ll just have it shipped back to my parents home in not time.

I wrote “Ship box from Ramzi” on my to-do list. I gave myself 5 minutes to finalize shipment but I was faced with many hurdles. First of all, the courier websites are outdated. You cannot speak to them outside of office hours and weekends. There’s no phone number or email which you can reach out directly to.

The next day I allocated 15 minutes to complete the task. Again, I was faced with tedious hurdles like excessive data-input and poor user experience . I thought to myself that I am missing something and this process surely can be easier than this.

The day after that, I called my mother and asked her to take care of this because I was busy with work. She happily complied.

My dear mother tried to phone up a few couriers and none of them would make it easy for her over the phone. She had to physically go to a sales office of a local courier, pay, fill and sign papers. She had to receive a form on her email, which then she forwarded to me to forward to my friend to enclose with the shipment once it’s collected.

Also, the weight, if different, meant that the service would be compromised. As a result, she paid for extra weight, which is non-refundable by the way.

I was astounded. Shipping something should not be this hard.

During that trip back home, I met with a friend whom I knew for years. He had known of shipping solutions in the UK which he wanted to launch in the MENA region to make shipping cheaper and easier. We found instant alignment to work on this together.

We launched a service for consumers & small businesses to book instant discounted shipping services to be picked up from their house or office 24/7, from the UAE to anywhere in the world.