. . . Social Shipping.
Did you know that:
• 31% of landfills are filled with packaging
material?
• 52% of shopping carts are abandoned
due to shipping costs?
ShipTogether allows you to share shipping with friends on online purchases to eliminate shipping charges. By using ShipTogether, online stores increase sales and buyers hold down their costs.
Online retailers can offer much better prices than brick-and-mortar stores. But, shipping usually kills the deal. To combat this problem, online retailers like Amazon and Buy.com give free shipping for orders over $25. However, their median unit selling price is below $25. If a customer wants to buy just a book, DVD or any item below $25, and does not want to pay the extra shipping, they either wait until they need something else, add (useless) filler items, or waste time looking for coupon codes.
ShipTogether leverages the power of social networks to ease these pains. Friends and colleagues spend a good part of a working day less than a block away from each other. It is very likely that more than one of them is ordering from a major retailer like Amazon in the same time-frame (a day to a week). Based on the users' privacy and sharing settings, ShipTogether combines a user's order with one of their friends' into a single order that is securely placed at the retailer. This is the online equivalent of asking a friend to pick-up something from a store.
ShipTogether not only saves money for both the customers and retailers, but also keeps the Earth greener by reducing the amount of packaging material used, and the filler items that are thrown away.
Ship Together is working towards integrating with online retailers’ checkout process to enable ShipTogether as an additional shipping option.
See Ship Poster (1.87 MB)
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ShipTogether Team:
- Ram Ravichandran (Founder)
PhD student, School of Computer Science - Thomas Emerson (Board of Advisors)
Professor of Entrepreneurship, Tepper School of Business - Michael Smith (Board of Advisors)
Professor of Information Technology and Marketing, H. John Heinz III College
Ship Together News:
  CS/IT |
  SocialNetworks |
  GreenTech |
