Earned 65 Euros from Ship-pal on my trip from India to Finland...

I travelled to India recently on a short trip, I had booked my flight with Qatar airways and as it has always been, Qatar airways is quite popular for their offered luggage capacity for quite reasonable fare than other airlines. While coming back to Finland from India, I was allowed 30 kg (check-in) + 7 Kg (cabin) luggage space.

You know, whenever, I come from India, my mother packs my luggage with all homemade laddoos, pickles, masalas and what not but since this was a very short trip, I did not take any luggage with me from Finland to India and hence even after so much stuffing of homemade items, my luggage weighed around 25 kg and I could still take 5 kg with me.

If there was no Ship-pal, I would have probably traveled with 5 kg empty space but since now there is a platform like Ship-pal, why not take the advantage of empty space in the luggage and earn some money? I added my India to Finland trip details on Ship-pal and on the same day I started getting order requests like chocolates to Patanjali goods to duty-free old monk rum and all the people were offering very reasonable incentives.

The process was quite simple like I used to receive emails from Ship-pal team something like "hey man, there is a person who wants to get so and so item and is willing to give so and so incentive, would you be able to get those items to Finland? You get to decide from where you want to purchase the items be it from a local shop or from an e-commerce website. If sounds good, let us know and we will connect you to the shopper."

I accepted around 7 order requests and all of the items in those order requests were having quite basic items and I had absolutely no problem in getting them to Finland, if I was unsure about a particular order, I talked to the Ship-pal team and got my questions answered very quickly and still if I was not sure about a certain product I did not accept that order request, so you see, I had absolute control over what I want to carry.

Sure, there was this question in my mind, "But hey, what if someone sends some illegal stuff with me? like drugs or something?" But then as I already mentioned that it's totally in my control which item I think is safe for me to carry and on top of that Ship-pal doesn't allow handing over products physically. So, the options are either the shopper buys the item online and put my address as delivery address or if I am not okay with sharing my address, I can order the item myself or buy it from some local shop and later get the money from shopper.

The communication with shoppers was quite smooth, we first used to communicate on Ship-pal platform but then with some of the shoppers I shifted the communication on WhatsApp and so I did not face any issues at all.

Once I got back to Finland, I notified all the shoppers that I am back and they can collect their items from me as per their convenience. One person wanted the items quite urgently, so he collected the item from the airport itself when I landed in Helsinki. Others took it from me as per their convenience and from places near to my home. I did not have to travel anywhere to deliver the items, shoppers came and collected the items from me.

So, it was quite a good experience in delivering those items. Biggest of all was the happiness on their faces when they receiving their items and the happy feeling inside me that I was able to help these people get their stuff from India and the cherry on the cake was incentive. I earned almost 65 Euros from these 7 deliveries and the luggage space I offered was just 5 Kgs.