Starter Kit. Idea 155 of 500. Cluster 7
Packing, dispatch and international shipping services
The mechanism, from the book
The tiny business pathway. A rural woman with an exceptional product should not need photography, English copy, packaging design and a distributor before the world can find her.
The first step
Collect quotes from three couriers for sending a 1 kg and a 5 kg parcel to London, Toronto and Melbourne, and put them in one table. Then ask 10 small producers who sell online how they ship abroad now and what it costs them. If pooling their parcels beats their current cost, offer to ship next month's orders at a fixed price per parcel.
- Who pays first
- A small online seller who loses foreign orders because shipping one parcel at a time costs more than the product.
- What leaves today
- Foreign orders are turned away because shipping is too expensive one parcel at a time, so the finished product never leaves at all.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Customs. Ask what export papers a small parcel of goods needs.
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how to register a small dispatch business.
Check before you spend
What goods can and cannot be posted abroad, what customs papers each parcel needs, and what insurance covers parcels lost on the way.
Find out these three numbers
- What does sending one parcel to Europe cost?
- How many producers would use a shared dispatch service?
- How long does a parcel take to arrive?
A comparison from the book
Sri Lanka House. Chapter Seventeen
"We ship to the hotel, the airport, or the other side of the world."
Shipping to the hotel, the airport or abroad is part of making a business world-ready.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.