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Get to know Eurosender in 5 seconds!

Country Manager Romania and Co-Founder EUROSENDER

With the recent launch of Eurosender in Romania, we had the chance to meet Tim Potočnik – Co-founder Eurosender – and we asked him a few questions. Eurosender is present in 26 countries and translates in 24 languages, and right now, the team is growing in Romania as Mihaela-Gabriela Buzoianu – Eurosender Country Manager – said in our previous interview.

Considering that over 2.3 milion Romanians have permanent residences outside the country and almost 300.000 are temporarly living aborad, Eurosender is a great idea for connecting expats’ and their families, bringing also lower prices for shipping services. We know that Romanians stay up to date with all novelties, so they love online transactions and services that bring comfort and ease your life. The number of credit card users is increasing as we speak, though right now Romanians prefer to pay cash on delivery. Trust issues, right? :)

So until Eurosender will win the trust of Romanians everywhere, here is what we found out from Tim Potočnik:

1. How did you and your partners arrive to the idea behind Eurosender? What inspired you and determined you to take action?
Tim Potočnik: I was returning from longer stay abroad and had to ship a couple of cardboard boxes and pieces of luggage from Warsaw to Ljubljana. When contacting different couriers, I experienced 6 transfer calls before customer support could serve me in English after that I received sky high quotes in Excel spreadsheet and I had to calculate by myself VAT, fuel surcharge, pick & ship surcharge and volume weight.

Simple task of booking a shipping of few items took me almost two days and I saw great opportunity in solving this problem. After I explained my frustrating experience with co founder Jan Stefe, we agreed on creating a simple, reliable, cost effective and user friendly engine which will help people with transportation.

2. So far, clients prefer your services for small packages or for larger ones?
Tim Potočnik: Our customers turn to our services for packages with the weight ranging from 2 kg to 50 kg. Most of the orders are placed for package of 20 kg and 30 kg. We can also provide services for the parcels which exceed this weight and in this case, a personal offer is made for each customer.

3. Have you considered expanding the services beyond Europe? For instance to and from US, Canada, Africa?
Tim Potočnik: Yes, in the long run we want to expand beyond the European borders, but for the moment we are focused on the European market as we want to become the largest company which offers logistical services through online orders. Therefore, we first strive to maintain our leading position in Europe and improve our services and then, we will certainly expand to other markets.

4. Beyond the obvious advantages a client has with Eurosender, how do you plan to gain the loyalty of people in each community/country?
Tim Potočnik: Low prices are certainly a motivating factor for customers because prices attract positive attitude towards changing their traditional shipping methods, usually through the black market. Beyond our competitive prices, we offer customer support in 11 different languages in order to ease the access to our services. We are growing our team and we want to cover all the languages spoken in Europe. At the same time, for our B2B clients, we offer loyalty programs and discounts depending on the volume of their order. For this segment, the prices paid don’t include the VAT of 22%, applicable in Slovenia.

There are many advantages of using our platform. We have united terms and conditions, no matter which is the courier company that performs the delivery and we act on the behalf of the customer in case of any claims.

5. About the plug-ins for e-commerce sites. Considering that you will work with more local couriers in Romania, will this plug-in eliminate the current option of choosing your way of transport (from the cheapest to the most expensive and fastest courier) from the website? Will it have options for customers that want fast service or those that just want the best price?
Tim Potočnik: We want to become partners with local courier companies as well, but this doesn’t exclude the services provided by international couriers. For each route, the best price to quality ratio will stand first. This would be the standard service, for the best price, but if a customer would like a faster option of delivery, we will also offer this possibility and the prices will change accordingly.