5 Questions with Teddy Chan, Co-Founder of AfterShip

Teddy Chan is the co-founder of AfterShip.

Teddy has been running an online store selling remote-controlled toys since 16, and now the store is generating USD2.5 million sales every year. He is a developer at heart and always explores ways to automate any repeated process. Other than product development, Teddy also sets milestone and new goals for the AfterShip team.

What is your startup?

AfterShip helps online retailers to track packages, notify customers. Improve customer experience and reduce customer enquiries after shipping. AfterShip also provides business intelligence on user’s shipping performance.

Online retailers can easily connect their store to AfterShip, and track all their shipments in one place. Users can easily show tracking information at their store with the AfterShip API. Online retailers can send out customizable notifications to customers when shipments are in transit, out for delivery, failed attempt, delivered or any exceptions happen.

How did you come up with this idea?

Like many other online retailers, my online store received many customer enquiries about order status or tracking orders. Instead of hiring a customer service to answer this repetitive question, I decided to develop a simple version of AfterShip that automatically track shipment and notify customers, which help me greatly reduce the customer enquiries.

I didn’t think about launching the tracking system for public use until I met my other two Co-Founders Andrew and Dante through Startup Weekend in 2011, and won the Global Startup Battle (aka Global Winner of Startup Weekend).

Who are you targeting and how big is the market in HK/Asia?

Our customers are mainly large online retailers in US and Europe (over 80%). For HK and Asia, our key customers are eCommerce stores sending international orders with over 20,000 shipments each month. Most users have their own stores (using Magento, Shopify, OpenCart, Spree) or sell a large volume in eBay or Amazon.

You may think large online retailers have developed system like AfterShip; however, in reality, those stores do not have a well-built system for tracking their millions of shipments shipped by different carriers (we have a client useing 110 carriers). Large corporates are looking for a more efficient and reliable solution to allow both the staff and buyers track their shipments, and provide marketing team business intelligence on their shipping performance.

What are your future plans for your startup?

Following the launch of AfterShip API, we are now focusing on sales and marketing, and signing up few key merchants. We will launch soon an affiliate program – each referral can earn 25% commission for the first-year fee, this will help us to form partnership with shopping carts, eCommerce developer companies and other pre-shipping solutions like ShipStations, ShipWorks and UDropShip.