(We originally posted this in 2020. You can read more of our original ideas in our archive.)
Problem: Online shopping leaves breadcrumbs of personally identifiable information. When you order a package to be delivered to your house, the product company, shipper (Amazon, FedEx, etc.), and delivery service (USPS, etc.) all know your information (address, name, potentially even phone number and email).
Solution: The business would focus on scaling and making commonplace the mechanism of double-blind shipping. A double-blind shipment is “when the shipper is unaware of where a shipment will be delivered to and the consignee is unaware of where the shipment is coming from” (definition curtesy of Flexport). It is a subset of a “blind shipment in which the shipper sends a shipment without knowing the ultimate destination and the consignee accepts the shipment without knowing the origin location.”
There are a few reasons to invest in double-blind shipping as a consumer or a business:
To protect the identity of the consignee and the shipper or supplier. Shipping double blind prevents the shipper from obtaining the consignee’s contact information (again as noted by Flexport)
(On blind shipping) Requested by distributors who want their goods shipped directly to the retailer to avoid going through additional distribution channels. This helps conceal if a product was shipped from a third-party vendor. The third party vendor’s information is removed from the shipping label and replaced with the seller’s information. Therefore, the customer is “blind” to who fulfilled the order.
So how do shipping providers implement this today? According to FreightPros (a company which specializes on blind and double-blind shipments), “If you want to do double blind shipping you’re going to need a freight broker. They’ll help you set up three separate bill of landings. The first will be used by the shipper at the time the freight is picked up by the carrier… The second bill of lading will be used at the time of delivery to the consignee… The final BOL used on a double blind shipment will be the ‘Correct’ BOL given to the freight carrier when the shipment is set up.” It’s extremely important when businesses re-sell products to consumers and don’t want the manufacturer or the consumers to know who they are: if these two parties knew each other than the middle-man would be cut out of the process.
So who are some big players in this industry today? One is Mercari, a Japanese e-commerce company. As described by Patrick McKenzie in a Tweet,
An innovation in Japan which I think will arrive everywhere: double-blinded shipping, where neither the sender nor receiver know each other's address. This was negotiated by a large marketplace (Mercari), which didn't want to have to walk so many users over the privacy hump. "How does this even happen?" Mercari gives you a number, which they've arranged via API with the logistics company. You give the number to your local convenience store or post office; they put a machine-readable label on it. It contains a pointer to a DB record. This enables a *much more important* innovation than double-blind addressing, which is virtual addressing. DNS for mail. You should be able to send @patio11 a package or letter. I'm at where I'm at; I should not need to update every company in world every time that changes. (Somewhat incredibly to me, Kuroneko will definitely let me redirect any package to @patio11 to my office or local convenience store via the web app, and I think they may eventually extend that to a virtualization layer, bootstrapping off the physical address they know I control)
Phrased another way, the full-form of this business is one that allows users to create “usernames” or “IDs” that shipping companies will hold on file and ship to rather than utilizing physical addresses. This could be a whole other way of verification and, through just having a username, would prevent bad actors or shippers from ever seeing the final shipping address of an individual. It would try to do what Stripe did for payments to shipping.
To learn more about double-blind shipping, I’d recommend this article by ShipBob, this article by SalesPad, or this article by Worldwide Express. Below is a diagram that may also be helpful.
Globally, the $700 billion shipping logistics industry is expected to be valued at $1.3 trillion by 2023 (according to InXpress) and the global dropshipping market size (which is a direct benefactor of double-blind shipping) was valued at USD 102.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to register a CAGR of 28.8% from 2019 to 2025 (according to Grandview Research).
Monetization: Selling this service as a premium to all of the customers who plug-in.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)