PiggyBee, one of the oldest crowdsourced delivery companies, launched a secure pay system on their website in June. This is a huge enhancement. Previously the requestor and deliverer using PiggyBee needed to work out payment between themselves. Sometimes this requires more than a little trust on one side or the other, like with my recent Werewolf delivery to Kyoto. Now PiggyBee can hold payment from the requestor until the delivery has been made. This takes all the risk out of the transaction on both sides.
I don’t usually report on technical advances of sharing economy travel companies. Or when I do it’s generally in my monthly news roundup. But for me this is great news because PiggyBee is the network on which I find most of my matches for deliveries. Although there are 77 social shipping companies (by my count: filter this table by Transportation and Delivery to see them all), most have few users and so it’s very hard to find a match for a specific travel route.
I’m really happy to see all the technical advances PiggyBee has been making over the past few years. They’ve gone from an email-based system with little functionality to a sophisticated website with an end to end technical solution for people needing deliveries and those doing the delivering. With recent enhancements, this brings PiggyBee up to the technical level of newer social shipping companies that launched in recent years. I hope this will lead to even more people using PiggyBee so I can continue to find people needing stuff delivered to the places I’m visiting.
To learn more about crowdsourced delivery and how you can profit from empty space in your luggage read my introductory guide to social shipping.