2020 at Neoship

Most of you may think that the previous year must have been comfortable and favourable for a company like Neoship. With all humility and respect towards those whom the coronavirus measures hit badly, even fatally, I am grateful that I can lead this company and that e-commerce and logistics profited last year. But looking back, it was not all that simple. Let us take it from the top …

The Pareto principle and rising prices

The last two years at least have been marked by rising prices in parcel transport. This „trend” did not pass us by either, so in order to maintain the quality of our services we had to pass these unpopular measures on to Neoship users. Unfortunately, some customers decided to move to the competition because of it. On top of that, for the vast majority of customers we adjusted prices by less than they had risen for us.

Several of the proverbial Pareto 20 % of customers generating 80 % of revenue left us, and from the rest we had a smaller profit than before. On top of all that, a new carrier entered the market. On the other hand, I am immensely grateful to everyone who stayed with us despite the price increases. I am convinced it is above all thanks to the quality of our services and solutions, which you can see for yourself in the references from a number of them.

Coronavirus, courier, loser, hero

Shops closed, people sitting at home, e-commerce growing. Except that your success stands or falls on whether you can get transport from point A to point B. I still vividly remember those first days of the spring lockdown. The uncertainty and the fear on the couriers' side for their own health and their families' health. The carrier's worries about whether it could handle a surge of parcels comparable to the Christmas season at the expected quality. And there was no way to prepare properly for that situation in advance. On the other side were e-shop owners whose orders shot up and who needed to dispatch very quickly. On top of that came the carrier's decision to cancel cash on delivery. The sense of responsibility and the pressure at that time were enormous. Those are the moments, opportunities and challenges where, if you handle them, you are a hero and they make you stronger. If you do not, you are a loser. My great admiration goes to everyone at Slovak Parcel Service who did everything they could to manage it. And they managed it in spring, in autumn and over Christmas, and they are managing it to this day – and we with them. It could have turned out the other way, if a critical part of the couriers, warehouse staff and so on had had to spend two weeks in quarantine or, worse, running a temperature on medication.

A new carrier, new solutions, new customers

Slovak Parcel Service had been our only transport partner since 2013. Although I greatly value our relationship with the company's management as well as the quality of their services, we increasingly felt the need and the demand from senders to be able to use other carriers through Neoship as well. Neoship is a comprehensive dispatch system that provides far more than just automated label printing. Besides the commercial matters, connecting with a carrier is considerably more demanding and requires more technical and data-related work. Those are the reasons why at the end of the summer we implemented another carrier into Neoship, namely GLS. Unfortunately, for the reasons above, we did not manage to implement Slovak Post and Zásielkovňa. Besides that, from the beginning of the year the whole team worked hard on free Neoship plugins for WooCommerce and PrestaShop, on bulk shipment creation from invoices in Omega and OBERON, on bulk matching of COD payments to invoices, on a better overview of parcel statuses, returns, shipment tracking and a host of other functionality and development on the backend too. Support, whether technical or customer-facing, is a chapter of its own. In any case, if you are curious what Neoship looks like, you can see it in our instructional video.

Ready-made and often free solutions that make work easier, and a fair price, are the reasons customers choose us. The quality of our customer service, speed, flexibility, handling technical requests and the completeness of our services including reliable transport are the reasons they stay with us.

This year we won the trust of the highest number of new customers in year-on-year comparisons. Yes, coronavirus contributed to that too, but I dare say to a far smaller extent than everything else described above.

The last are first for me … people and partners

If you do not have a good team you can rely on, you will not seize your opportunities in good times and may not „survive” the hard ones. I am proud of my colleagues, because they are the ones pulling Neoship upwards. They did a great job and I am very grateful to them for it. They put out fires when things were burning and worked hard when they were not. We managed it even when we had to be at home in quarantine. Even during the period when both of our customer service colleagues fell ill with Covid at the same time. It was demanding, but we came out of it stronger. If you are curious about our team, take a look at our promo video, which we managed to film in the summer despite the coronavirus year.

Our partners also contributed a great deal to our success, and I value them highly and thank them for their cooperation. Our shared system integrations and business relationships bring customers many benefits. I probably cannot name them all, but alongside SPS and GLS they certainly include CREATIVE sites, SuperFaktúra, Neonus, LepoCreative, UI42, Deal Factory, GT Servis, Selleriz and Vision Advisory.

The numbers for 2020 and the plans for 2021

This is how it was

Since we started in 2013 we have passed 1,000,000 parcels dispatched through Neoship. We reached revenue of over 900,000 €, up from the 770,000 € achieved in 2019. More than 140 users used Neoship. The Neoship team is made up of 6 people + 3 partners, and we would certainly like to welcome a new programmer. We finance all our activities from our own resources, i.e. from profit.

This is how it will be :)

Launching Neoship 3.0 = higher speed, more functionality, better UX, faster carrier implementation, more efficient support.

We will implement at least two new carriers into Neoship.

Growth of 100 % in new customers compared with 2020.

Satisfied customers, partners and employees.

A closing thought

On the noticeboard in our office we have a quote: „It is hard to live easily and easy to live hard.” I wish you and us alike every success in overcoming difficulties and challenges, reaching the goals we set and living as easily as possible.