Peer to Peer shipping – Listing my trips for the next six months

I finally sat down and added my trips for the second half of 2016 into a bunch of crowdsourced delivery sites. This was a pretty time consuming task, and I didn’t even do it for all my trips (I skipped the domestic ones) or on all of the sites (I’ll explain this more below). I travel very light, so I have plenty of capacity to check an extra suitcase on most of my trips, and peer-to-peer shipping allows me to use this empty suitcase for profit.

As I’ve mentioned before, the problem with peer-to-peer delivery right now is that there are so many companies just getting in to this, and they all have very low adoption rates so far. This means you have to list your trips on a bunch of different sites and hope someone who needs a delivery on the route you are traveling can find you on one of them. So I kept putting off listing my trips because I knew it would take a lot of time. In the end I spent about 2 hours on this, and could easily have put in more time if I didn’t already have accounts on a bunch of the sites.

In summary, here’s how I tried to do this efficiently:

First I went to my spreadsheet and filtered on “delivery” in the Sub-Category column. This gave me the 80 peer-to-peer delivery companies out there. I looked at the “Location” column and decided that any sites focused on a country I will be visiting, as well as all that are globally focused were potential matches. I clicked on the link for all of those companies to open them up in new tabs.

That’s a lot of tabs – so many social delivery sites!

Then I visited each site, created an account if I didn’t already  have one, and attempt to list my trips. For those that focused just on one country or one region I only listed the relevant trips. On the global sites I listed all of my trips.

A few of these crowdsourced delivery companies had only a handful of listings and it was clear their low volume meant that listing my travels would not get me any jobs so I skipped it, preferring not to announce my private information anywhere it’s not serving my purposes.

I found 26 companies that were likely matches for the geography of my travels. In the end I only listed my trips with 16 of those. Most of the rest had technical issues that made it impossible for me to create an account or a listing, and a few were so confusing I gave up. I also discovered that three of these 26 had disappeared (they’ve since been removed from my spreadsheet).

Once again PiggyBee rose above the rest. This is the site I consistently find delivery jobs with. Listing on there was a breeze and I quickly got 15 matches emailed to me. None of the other sites I listed with had any immediate matches for my trip, and one of them (Shypmate, the one focused on Africa) emailed to say they don’t yet cover Kenya and so my listing would be deleted.

Now I just sit back and wait to see if anyone wants to pay me to carry stuff in my luggage.