With Shipping Market, parcel delivery service Free market installed in Uruguay since 2018, the company has made constant investments in technology and has a team of 1,600 people. UES Postal is the leading company in the distribution market and one of its main customers. under the eCommerce Day, Ámbito.com toured the distribution center located in the neighborhood of The Aguada in Montevideo; and spoke with the main executives of the company.
“We started with Upostal, a traditional private mail, in 2003,” said Mauricio Pintos commercial manager of UES Upostal, about the beginnings of the company that today ranks as a leader in the market, according to the latest report on postal services from the Communication Services Regulatory Unit (Ursec)from 2022. “We were growing and developing other types of services associated with the business segment, and we were acquiring a turnkey culture providing the entire solution. Then the ecommerce in Uruguay and analyzing the possibility of development, we began to see possibilities and options to develop our own line of business. We also bought UES in 2020, which was our competition,” he added.
Today, as Pintos explained, UES Upostal has more than 1,500 collaborators throughout the country and has more than 70 pick-ups, in addition to a center of distribution in each of the country’s departments, and its own fleet of trucks, vans and motorcycles. On this, “we have a team of technological development own, who was the one who developed our shipping management system and is now developing a new version of the stock management system that will allow us to offer a storage service for the e-commerce”, said the commercial manager of the company.
Mercado Libre, one of its main clients
A few years ago, Free market It has become one of its main clients. “It has helped us a lot to raise quality standards. Today we have more than 86% effectiveness, that is that on the first visit I already deliver the package. 86% is very high and we have 97-98% customer compliance, so obviously operations of that size help you raise the bar and bring all your logistics to those quality standards,” Pintos considered.
“We, for example, like to get involved with the client’s project and get to know their business well. Each business has a DNA and in order to do your job well you have to know the DNA of that business. The ecommerce It had exponential growth in the pandemic and has been growing year after year. From last year to this year we grew by 30%“said the executive.
For his part, Federico Rosso, supervisor of Transport for Uruguay of Free market he valued the present of the country as a market, but above all its possibilities for the future: “It is a country that still has many opportunities for growth. In other countries, out of every 10 sales go through Mercado Envíos. In Uruguay, that number is in 7.5, almost 8 sales“, he pointed.
The cultural influences this result, according to Rosso. “There we have different difficulties or barriers that we have to cross. One is that there is a universe of shipments that due to their characteristics, whether due to dimensions or weight, we cannot capture for a matter of ensuring the shipment and that there are no difficulties on that side. And then, on the other hand, there is that Uruguayan idiosyncrasy that everything is close to him and sometimes he prefers to go, look at it and buy it there. So, our challenge is a bit to generate that trust, that they know that if they buy with shipping they will receive it well, in time and form, etc.”, he explained to Ámbito.com.
The pandemic of Covid-19 influenced the investment and expansion of the company. “We saw exponential growth when the pandemic began and that was also driven by the start of flex, this same-day delivery service. It was a bit of a service that required the consumer to want things faster and faster. So it accelerated the growth that we had to have in one or two years to a few months”, said Rosso, adding that another of the recent initiatives in Uruguay to increase the penetration of the consignment market in the sales of Free market, was the implementation of services branch offices. “Today the buyer of Free market You can buy with home delivery or to pick up at the nearest branch. We implemented that just a month ago, but we have already seen that it drives very well and it has been giving us good penetration,” he said.
In addition to business growth, this situation has allowed Free market generate a good impact in terms of job creation. “Today in Uruguay there are 1,600 people, I would tell you that half are from tech team. And then, in what refers to the operational area, in reality, we continue to perfect ourselves while waiting to continue growing and maturing the site so that other more complex services will arrive in the future”, said Federico Rosso.
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Source: Ambito
