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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

What type of package is small enough to fit in someone's luggage, light enough to not cost extra baggage allowance, tolerates non-delivery well enough to lose 10% of shipments to flaking non-professional couriers, and is not well-served by UPS, FedEx, or airmail, and cannot be transported at rock-bottom costs with mild latency via a shipping container?

I have an answer to this question: illegal drugs. I don't have a second answer to this question. This makes me think that you'd have difficulty finding 1,000 of legal packages to run through a proof of concept, to say nothing of scaling to the millions you need to have a viable logistics business.

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To be fair there are lots of small items that have great value. Jewelry, watches, etc. Though your points about economics are still valid. Pay FedEx $15 to ship a $4,000 Omega watch, or give it to a complete stranger that is traveling via AirBnB? FedEx wins.

How about legal drugs, Pharmaceutical products, etc. I do not know a single person who doesn't ship items with friends. It's not a new idea i'm proposing, but a way for non friends to make money, and for it to be more often.

When Uber first came out i thought it won't work because of all the kidnappings and robberies that would happen. I wonder if you have the same skepticism about travellers becoming carriers.

Edit: not disagreeing, it's a totally valid reason.

But now you've gone from "huge opportunity" to "maybe something that can be used for some pharmaceutical products".

> I do not know a single person who doesn't ship items with friends.

Huh? Where/in what culture is that? I don't think I know anyone who does ship items with friends with any kind of frequency. I think I've shipped an item with a friend once in my life (a figurine that I could only find on sale in the US), and there are proxy buyer services that cover that use case in a much easier (and safer for them) way.

Counter-anecdote: I live in Canada, and it is not at all uncommon to ask friends who are visiting the U.S. to pick up items on their behalf (either alcohol and tobacco, which are often significantly cheaper at the border's duty-free stores, or e-commerce purchases that would not ship into Canada--there are several places close to the border that will receive and hang onto such packages for a fee).

Maybe that doesn't count as "shipping an item with a friend" but it's quite similar.

I think a service that buys something for you (from businesses that sell to the public) has a big safety advantage over one that ships custom packages - while I'm sure it would still be possible to smuggle drugs that way doing so becomes a lot more complex. Likewise one that holds it and lets you pick up in person (which usually require you to present ID) rather than shipping it on.

And while it's a fair example, I think Canada, where most of the population lives very close to the US border, probably doesn't generalise to the rest of the world.

My guess is that's cheaper to ship via containers (over sea).

also, legal drugs that are transported in strangers' luggage quickly become illegal drugs.

Legal? Illegal? You'll never create a disruptive startup with that attitude!

You could mitigate the non-delivery risk by making the courier post a security deposit.

There is a pretty healthy "Japan proxy" market, especially for higher-end Japanese designer clothes. You could ship it already, but these would also fit in with that business model.

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