With the rise of online transportation such as Uber and Go-Jek in Indonesia, a new service emerges as a part of service diversification: the instant courier service.
The idea is, for those of you who don’t know, is instead of ‘delivering’ you (a passenger) to the destination, they will instead deliver your goods or food to the destination on the same day, just like they ‘deliver’ you, as opposed to the conventional courier which takes at least a day for express, same town service.
Some expect this new service would’ve replaced the conventional courier, as it is much faster and convenient. They pick your goods to your location instead of you having to find a post office or drop box in order to send the goods. Yet months after months, conventional courier still running well seemingly without distraction to the new service.
There are clearly few points in which instant courier will NEVER replace conventional courier, but instead to become a complement service forever:
1. Convenience
Contrary to what advertised as a convenience, an instant courier can be a pain in the ass for some situations, as I already experienced it myself when I sent two dozens of t-shirt using GO-JEK (mind you, this is an errand for dad). Sending tons of stuff using conventional courier means you print lots of labels, stick the label on, and just drops those items for price calculation. Things are even better in some countries supporting online parcel registration. Prepay the parcel, just drop the load to any drop point and forget it.
However, with an instant courier, you have to order a separate courier for each good, manually inputting the pickup address and destination address for each. This doesn’t even consider that some drivers will be confused with the address and call you to confirm it. This rarely happens with conventional courier as the drivers work full time in their own designated areas. Unless you have a serious typo in your address, chance are the driver will be able to locate the address even with a minor error in the input.
2. Price
While online transportation is there to help you save with their lower price, it doesn’t apply to the courier service. The courier service offered uses the same rate as transportation, of course, as there is no difference in emission between transporting human and goods or foods.
In Indonesia, intracity regular service is flat at IDR 9000 (merely 90c USD equivalent), and even this rate applies to intercity services for neighboring locations. Instant courier, on the other hand, still uses range and time to calculate the fare.
3. Corporate Services
Some companies need to send goods and documents periodically, and most of those companies usually are visited by courier every day to pick those up, then billed by the end of the month for the expenses. This thing isn’t just possible with instant couriers as they have limited capacity in both storage, availability, and service range.
4. Intercity Services
Nothing much to say about this one. Instant courier can’t deliver goods intercity. Well, technically they could. You could try, but chances are the driver will simply cancel the order once they see where you ask them to go. Who wants to go using a motorcycle to other cities just to deliver goods for you? How will they get back? How will they cover the cost if they have to stay overnight?
5. Capacity
Instant courier uses a motorcycle. You cannot send furniture using them. Case closed.
That being said, everyone should be grateful for the existence of the instant courier, even the conventional courier company. After all, if today we need to pass important documents for like, a meeting in the next hour, an instant courier is there to go if you are willing to pay more. Hey, they are insured as well! But for some things and cost-savings options, the conventional courier will always be there for us.
