What Was The First Same-Day Delivery Company?

If people need to send something across Europe quickly, there are a range of next-day courier services available, who through remarkably efficient logistics, planning and skilled driving can send most types of cargo vast distances in a short space of time.

Same-day delivery is significantly more complex, and there is a far stricter limit on what can be transported and how far it can go in far less than 24 hours.

However, for small but vital services such as organ transplantation and medical deliveries, same-day delivery can be a vital lifeline. However, the first company to bring it to the masses was a somewhat unconventional company with a somewhat conventional fate.

Kozmo, also known by its website name Kozmo.com, was a point-to-point same-day courier delivery company that was designed around delivering basic goods across urban areas, such as food, videos, books and magazines.

This concept proved very popular after launching in 1999, but despite this popularity, it would go spectacularly out of business by April 2001. Why was this?

The reason was that whilst the business concept was popular, the business model was at best highly suspect for the simple reason that it claimed to offer free delivery of these items, unlike delivery companies that came before or since.

Whilst this would make it immediately popular, questions were raised about whether it could actually be profitable without charging for delivery, even with the company’s claim that they made money through not having to pay for retail establishments.

Ultimately, the financial crash and bursting of the dotcom bubble stopped anyone from finding out, and the company would fail around the same time as other pioneering online delivery companies such as Webvan and Pets.com.

Same-day delivery has become an incredibly popular service, but successful couriers factor in its complexities and provide an effective, tailored service for customers.