The internet has opened up countless business opportunities that were once the preserve of corporate entities, allowing individuals and small groups to offer goods and services as well as to share resources. Often an “app” is involved that provides connectivity between individuals that would otherwise not meet or encounter each other. Two areas that spring to mind are car-sharing, taxi-type services and holiday and short-term lets of rooms and buildings, the most well-known examples in those areas are perhaps AirBnB and Uber.
An area that is emergent but not yet mature is “last-mile” deliveries where individuals can take on the packages and parcels couriered to a depot and deliver them to their neighbours for a small fee rather than relying on conventional couriers to fulfil the complete delivery. Such peer-to-peer (P2P) crowdsourced delivery services are gaining traction worldwide and offer a way for the big couriers to cut out the inefficient last part of their logistics and offload it into locals where it might bolster a growing micro-economy.
Research in the International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management has looked at how well the implementation of P2P crowdsourced delivery is going in Egypt. The findings shed light on the potential benefits and the remaining challenges.
Karim Soliman of the College of International Transport and Logistics at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport in Cairo, employed a deductive approach and quantitative research methods to gauge public sentiment towards this innovative delivery model. Soliman writes that encouragingly, respondents of various ages and education were already familiar with crowdsourcing, even if they were not familiar with the term itself.
Soliman notes that in Egypt P2P delivery services are being used within the same city, as one might expect. Users are less keen to use such services between cities or internationally, although one might posit that this would defeat the object of using “last-mile” P2P delivery and would represent a much larger-scale crowdsourced delivery service. Such a service may well emerge if it has not already been in place for many years in various forms. The research also suggests that there is a need to develop professional guidelines for those offering P2P delivery to enhance trust and confidentiality and also to address the matter of insurance.
Soliman, K. (2023) ‘Exploratory analysis of the viability of crowdsourced delivery in Egypt: developing a peer-to-peer platform’, Int. J. Logistics Systems and Management, Vol. 45, No. 4, pp.447–470.
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