The company helps merchants to fight Amazon menace in Europe with a platform that connects their e-commerce stores with gig-economy workers trained for fast package delivery. "Ziticity" already operates in Lithuania and Estonia, where it reached the average delivery time of 42 minutes, Practica Capital writes in a press release.
Delivery speed is becoming increasingly important for European e-commerce. Majority of local e-shops cannot offer consumers same-day delivery - the new expected standard raised by industry giants, such as Amazon. As a result, 1 out of 4 customers abandons a shopping cart if such option is not available. Therefore business owners are in need of a faster logistics provider that could excel conventional courier companies. Currently, postal services and other traditional delivery companies cannot tackle the urgent needs due to long distribution processes and infrastructural peculiarities. Finally, the in-house fleet is a rare alternative as most businesses lack funds and logistics expertise.
"Ziticity" offers businesses a scalable way to utilize already existing urban infrastructure - people and their means of transportation (cars, bicycles, e-scooters, shared mobility, etc.) to deliver goods. Anyone can join the platform, become a courier and earn money delivering packages on their free time. Unlike competitors, "Ziticity" provides the on-demand solution that optimizes and distributes deliveries in real-time without usual distribution centres that would cause major delays.
"Amazon became the biggest online retailer in Europe. Moreover, they are investing $800 million to enable free one-day shipping for Prime members. This means even more consumers are going to get used to having whatever they order show up at their doorsteps in 24 hours or less. Never has the need been greater for the rest of e-commerce to stay competitive and meet these changing customer expectations. We are privileged to enter the market at this particular time and give merchants even better tool to compete - 45-minute delivery", - "Ziticity" Co-founder and CEO Laimonas Noreika explained.
"Ziticity" had previously attracted angel investment from one of the early Uber’s engineers Maksim Golivkin, who now leads the engineering team at Instacart. The startup recently graduated from Startup Wise Guys B2B SaaS Batch 12 acceleration program in Tallinn, Estonia.