As ecommerce booms across Asia, Easy Ship wants to make logistics less painful

Like with many opportunities, Tommaso Tamburnotti first saw it as a brick wall that he ran head-long into. That brick wall is logistics. It led to the founding of a new startup called Easy Ship. “Together with my co-founders, Augustin and Reuben, I was working at Lazada. […] In September 2013, I was called to Hong Kong to build the regional cross-border marketplace team,” Tamburnotti says. “The plan was to have as many ecommerce sellers [as possible] from Hong Kong and China selling on Lazada to our clients in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Sales grew rapidly, but soon the problem of shipping internationally showed up and we found ourselves dealing with a very unstructured and fragmented logistic industry.”

He continues:

Our sellers were struggling, choosing which shipping courier to use and spending hours in packing every day. Our sellers were spending more than 40 percent of their times to pack their items, choosing which out of the top 30 couriers to use, preparing all the shipping material, and tracking the status of the orders shipped. It was a mess. Suddenly we realized the huge value added of a stable and reliable logistics platform and we decided to create Easyship.

The idea is that Easy Ship offers a single end-to-end solution for pick-up, packing, labelling, shipping, and tracking.

Now the former Rocket Internet executive is bootstrapping the new startup from Hong Kong’s Swire Blueprint Accelerator. They’ll graduate from there in July.

“Rocket Internet was a great school,” says Tamburnotti of his experience at Lazada. “It taught me how to be driven, structured, and focus on execution.”

Cross-border shopping

Today, Tamburnotti and the Easy Ship team is pitching the startup onstage at our Startup Arena contest at Tech in Asia Singapore 2015. After explaining the problems that the new venture is trying to solve, Tamburnotti goes on to explain to the audience and the Arena judges who this is aimed at.

Tommaso Tamburnotti pitches Easy Ship at the Startup Arena contest today.

“We are currently focused on the Hong Kong and Southeast Asia markets,” he begins. “Hong Kong is one the biggest trading hubs in the world, especially important in the ecommerce world. According to the latest Asia Index, there are more than 10,000 companies based in Hong Kong that are selling online, more than 240 million parcels are shipped every year to over 200 countries worldwide. And this is growing over 19 percent year-on-year. We are talking of a market of US$5 billion per year, just for Hong Kong.”

“Our main targets are online traders, selling on Ebay, Amazon, Alibaba, that every day receive orders from all over the world, and want to save time and money outsourcing the shipping and handling to specialists like us,” emphasizes Tamburnotti.