24
« Last post by Frank9755 on Today at 02:38:23 pm »
There isn't really an easy way to do this, unfortunately. Bikes are basically big, awkward but fragile parcels and it costs a fair bit to ship them around the place.
There are three European road parcels networks: DPD, GLS and FedEx. Your bike will go on one of them. Sendbike will have a pretty website and some logo-covered boxes but the core of their business involves being a reseller on behalf of carriers, a bit like Parcel2Go, SevenSenders, ParcelMonkey and loads of others. They will negotiate deals with one or more of the above to provide a service. The core of the service will be transporting your bike from door to door. That bit is fixed. But there are other elements, like customer service (or lack thereof), insurance, providing boxes and packaging materials, etc, which they can play around with and offer their own variations of in place of the carrier's default service.
Their business involves three main things:
- buying space on the carrier network/s in bulk at a price that is cheaper enough than the carriers would sell to you, after they have added their margin
- reengineering the variable bits of the service to increase their margin - which may involve saving money by giving lower service (I am not saying they do this - I don't have any specific knowledge)
- marketing their service cost-effectively. I expect focusing on niches like bikes might help here.
You could try getting direct quotes from DHL, GLS/Parcelforce and FedEx to cut out the middle man. They'll probably be more expensive as you don't have any volume to justify a discount, but they might offer better insurance cover, and answer the phone if your bike doesn't show up. Of course, most times your bike will show up undamaged and on time so this won't matter. Or you could look for alternatives to Sendbike, ie other resellers. But they will basically be doing the same thing, so there's no reason why they would be any better or cheaper. There isn't anyone running a fleet of transit vans round Europe taking bikes from place to place!
I hope yours works out well!
Recent Posts