Crowdshipping can be conceived as an example of people using social networking to behave collaboratively and share services and assets for the greater good of the community, as well as for their own personal benefit.
In 2009, ordinary car drivers could register as "couriers" using the site Stuff2Send.com, and had an option to connect with the sender and arrange a fee in case their journeys coincided with parcel deliveries.
[4] In the years after the Great Recession, startups including Zipments, mmMule, PiggyBee, Deliv, and Friendshippr were created based on the market's need to earn extra income.
[5][6][7][8] The 2014 publication Issue in Focus by the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General raises concerns over the new innovation of crowdshipping in the brief titled "Using the 'Crowd' to Deliver Packages".
[9] In this publication, the Office of the Inspector General describes crowdshipping as "a subset of the larger 'crowdsourcing' movement [which] involves the use of technology to marshal a large group of people to accomplish something".
[15] The provision of local delivery services relies on transport resources that the crowd has access to and makes use of, including individual logistics capabilities such as picking up goods, driving, and delivering.
This type of shipping system seems particularly suitable for oversized or non-standard items that cannot be sent by post because their unusual volume makes the use of standard services impractical or too expensive.
[18] Crowd freight forwarding initiatives operate using search engines that match clients' requests to travelers' offers with the same origin and destination.