On-demand shipping company Shyp partners with eBay
eBay, the biggest resale marketplace in the world, announced this week it is expanding a partnership with on-demand shipping start-up Shyp. Shipping is the "biggest pain point of online selling," eBay said in a joint press release with Shyp. To help people send out their sold items with minimal hassle, eBay sellers in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles can now use Shyp's mobile app to hail an on-demand courier who will pick up items they sold within 20 minutes. Shyp will then pack the items and send them straight to the buyer on the sellers behalf, all for a total cost of around $5.

Selling stuff on eBay may have just become a lot easier, at least in a few US cities. Starting today, some sellers will no longer have to pack and send merchandise themselves thanks to eBay's new deal with Shyp.

The San Francisco-based startup works by picking up whatever you want to send, packing it up, and shipping it—just tap a button in the app. With the new integration, eBay sellers can connect their accounts to the Shyp app and see a feed of their recently sold items. Once an eBay seller is ready to ship the items, Shyp promises to show up within 20 minutes.

As of this morning, Shyp’s eBay integration is live in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Shyp says it's waiving its pickup and packaging fees for these eBay sellers through the at least the end of June. But that doesn't necessarily mean the company isn't making any money: Shyp's business model relies on pocketing the difference between the volume discounts it gets from carriers such as FedEx and UPS and the retail shipping rates it charges customers.

For Shyp CEO Kevin Gibbon, the eBay deal is a kind of natural culmination—he started Shyp in 2013 after experiencing the difficulties of being an eBay seller first-hand.

Shyp says that in beta tests of the new eBay integration, nearly half of sellers never sold on eBay previously, and more than half used it again. The most commonly sold items included clothing and shoes, followed by cell phones, computers, and other electronics. The most expensive item shipped was a $6,677 Leica camera lens.

With 162 million active buyers, eBay is a big marketplace that makes sense for Shyp to seek a piece of. Still, the track record of startups trying to get between customers and the post office have been mixed. Some players have flamed out, while other efforts never seemed to get off the ground. Lately, the US Post Office itself has also been making a bigger effort to embrace the digital world.

It’s a little too early to tell how Shyp will fare, but the company claims it's growing 20 to 25 percent month over month. And if the eBay connection catches on, Gibbon says there’s potential for additional services, such as double-checking whether an eBay product is indeed “as pictured.”

“We hope longer term, we’ll be able to help out with a lot of other friction points of online marketplaces,” he says.