Martin Luther King Jr. made history with his “I have a dream” speech.
John Lennon captured the hearts of many with his song ‘Imagine’.
What does the two have in common? A vision that reached for something greater.
AfterShip was born from a similar notion. Aiming to promote entrepreneurship culture, our goal is to help others achieve their dream in making their own business.
Using technology, we set out to make shipment tracking easier for online sellers and buyers, cutting out the unnecessary distractions commonly found in shipment tracking.
Partnering with different eCommerce platforms and over 370 couriers, we help manage and organize shipments. Basically, we do all the leg work of monitoring shipments so you may concentrate on more important matters.
The AfterShip app available in both IOS and Android helps users get an overview on their packages. They're updated regularly to create a better user experience.
Check out the articles below to learn more about the latest redesigns.
But of course we did more than just update our existing products. Here are some of the highlights of the things we did in 2016!
Connecting With Visionaries
At the beginning of this year, Shopify had invited us to attend their Unite Conference. Andrew, one of the co-founders of AfterShip flew all the way to San Francisco, meeting partners and developers alike.
The experience was a rewarding one and an opportunity to connect with similar minds. As the name implies, it was a chance for AfterShip to ‘Unite’ with other great thinkers.
We've had an amazing two days. Huge thank you to all our partners and developers who made #ShopifyUnite awesome. pic.twitter.com/p8fanNsXUT
— Shopify Partners (@ShopifyPartners) March 23, 2016
As part of our process to help startups better manage their shipment tracking, we are always on the lookout to connect with different eCommerce platforms.
In June 2016, we announced our partnership with nopCommerce . The cooperation started from a chance discovery which sparked a conversation between the two companies.
Apparently they were looking to develop a plugin in nopCommerce for AfterShip. As a result, AfterShip is now available for any merchants on nopCommerce.
No worries, we also keep the users of our present partners in mind!
For example, to provide a seamless experience, in August we integrated the AfterShip search engine into the BigCommerce platform for better post purchase shipment tracking. Here’s the article for more detail of the update.
‘A Better Shipment Tracking Experience on BigCommerce with AfterShip’
Expanding Our Reach
In our dream to make shipment process easier for merchants, we created AfterShip, a shipment tracking solution.
It helped sellers connect with their clients, notifying them about their packages and reducing the anxiety and complication that comes from the lack of information.
But even then, merchants still have to go through the process of filling out shipping information every time they made a sales. We thought, why not create a program that simplifies all this?
So in November we introduced Postmen!
Not only is Postmen an auto fulfillment program which helps businesses fill out shipment tracking forms, it also helps merchants manage multiple carriers, identifying the rates based on your shipping requirements.
Check out Postmen’s main site to learn more!
Challenging The Current Status Quo
This year we also hosted an event ourselves. The first ever Hackathon at AfterShip. Unlike a traditional hackathon which is all about computer programming, ours had a little twist.
We wanted to shake things up in a fun way. The competition challenged us to step out of our comfort zone, partnering up with different people, we had to come up with solutions that would work alongside AfterShip.
In the course of three and a half days, we came up with 19 ideas of which 6 were selected! The hackathon encouraged us to think on our feet, polishing our presenting skills as well as ability to execute the vision within a short time frame.
Click HERE for an in-depth view of our winning ideas!
![](https://aftership.ghost.io/content/images/2016/10/as-blog-hacker-cover.jpg" width="700")
Our vision to reach higher is a never ending one. If you’ve been following us, you may already know about our most recent offering, the AfterShip Facebook Bot.
As the first of our kind, we are sometimes mistaken by users as being the courier. In our goal to cut out the tedious work and help users get straight to the results, we introduced AfterShip’s Facebook Bot.
Created as a side project launched just before Christmas, the Bot aims to help provide immediate tracking over Messenger for our users. If you’ve played around with it you’ll know that it’s far from perfect but it’s our way of showing that we care.
I’ll be signing off for now as 2016 draws to an end. Look forward to sharing more interesting announcements and ideas with you in 2017!
Wish you a Happy New Year
