A freshly launched New York-based startup is aiming to bring the latest high-tech gadgets to the underserved Canadian market — all in less than four business days.
BigAppleBuddy, which offers high-end shipping services for tech and fashion brands to locales all over the world, is appealing to frustrated Canadians who can’t purchase recently released gizmos north of the border. As a white-glove ecommerce service, BigAppleBuddy allows online shoppers to purchase goods from U.S. stores that don’t normally ship abroad, and then delivers those high-tech toys to buyers’ doorsteps.
“One of the advantages for (the) Canadian market is that international shipping to Canada is very quick,” said Raminta Lilaite, public relations manager at BigAppleBuddy. “Most Canadian customers opt for the express shipping option, which means that once the item arrives at BigAppleBuddy’s facility in New York City from the store, Canadian customers will receive the parcel the very next day.”
According to one recent report from Accenture and AliResearch (the research arm of the Alibaba Group), cross-border ecommerce hit $300 billion in sales in 2015, and is projected to balloon to $1 trillion by 2020. And BigAppleBuddy is the newest ecommerce attempting to cash in on the cross-border shopping phenomenon, with shipping from the U.S. to almost 200 countries across the globe.
Eager online buyers go through the service for their entire cross-border shopping venture — including discount negotiations with retailers, personalized advice on shipping options, and packaging those shiny new products. And consumers ready to jump on this cross-border bandwagon can expect to pay a minimum service fee of $40 for each order (the service doesn’t markup the cost of the product or shipping charges).
While other similar cross-border shipping services exist for tech-starved Canucks, company officials tout BigAppleBuddy as the first such luxury ecommerce service.
“My background is service oriented, which means that a client always come first. I will negotiate the best price for the gadget that my client wants directly with the store, supervise every step of product delivery and answer emails around the clock,” said Phillis Chan, BigAppleBuddy co-founder and a former Australian lawyer, in a statement.