Top Logistics & Supply Chain Trends (September 2023)

While Freightwaves is a freight logistics software company, many in the industry know them for their strategically built media empire which targets industry workers in order to grow the Freightwaves brand, part of the driver behind their 1,800% growth in 2019 from the prior year.

For truck drivers, a particularly captive audience, an audio-only medium is the ideal way to reach them as they can't use normal workday distractions like Twitter or YouTube. Freightwaves' "What the Truck?" podcast taps into this enormous audience. Truck driving is the single most common job in the majority of US states, with 3.5 million truck drivers in total across the country.

As the brand became more widely-known because of their media play, it became easier for them to sell their logistics software into enterprises. This has helped Freightwaves begin to penetrate what is one of the world's largest industries: At 9.6 trillion dollars, the global logistics industry is downright massive and represents about 12% of the global economy, bigger than even the insurance industry and financial services industry combined.

Pandabuy’s growth is one of the fastest. The site saw 4M monthly visits in September 2022, up 3300% from 120K just 5 months ago. And 3/4ths of the site traffic is direct, meaning users went straight there or have it bookmarked, a sign of strong retention.

The company combines an e-commerce front-end with logistics to help customers buy products from Taobao, the Chinese e-commerce site whose GMV is larger than the entire US e-commerce industry. First, customers request products, then Pandabuy buys them, ships them to a company warehouse, photographs them for inspection, packages them, and ships them to the US (in part to avoid US anti-counterfeiting rules, Taobao does not allow shipments directly to residential US addresses).

Pandabuy’s power users are members of Reddit communities like the 1.1M-member-strong FashionReps ("reps" is short for "replicas", and "replicas" is a euphemism for "counterfeits"). Users on the subreddit post extensive guides to finding high-quality knockoffs, as well as "haul" posts highlighting the products they bought (with prices quoted in RMB and volumes quoted in kilograms). The FashionReps community seems to view itself as the digital version of thrifting: while users want to look great without spending much money, some of the thrill comes from tracking down the first Taobao seller to offer knockoffs of a hot new product.

As more and more consumers start including “near me” in their Google searches, many businesses have tried unconventional methods to rank locally.

Whenever a business lists an address in order to rank in local search results, Google mails a postcard with a code that the business must then confirm, almost like two-factor-authentication for real estate. Some businesses were able to expand their brick and mortar footprint overnight, in the eyes of Google, by buying access to virtual mailboxes and receiving photos of the verification cards when they were delivered.

Strategies like this are among many factors that are driving the growth of virtual business addresses, though it mostly comes down to several macro trends. For one, the nomadic lifestyle, along with remote work, is on the rise. Many small businesses are increasingly being started without addresses, but there are still many documents, products, and services that require an address. From company registration with the government to payouts via Stripe or YouTube, addresses are still widely essential.

Privacy and professionalism also play a big role. Small business owners who work from home say that using their home address may be seen as unprofessional and they don’t want their address listed so prominently online. Virtual business address sellers are easily able to price discriminate between those seeking privacy versus those seeking prestige: Companies in this space tend to mark up addresses like “Park Avenue” whereas those who are solely privacy-conscious don’t care for one specific address over another.

And not only is it a massive and not-fully-tapped market, but the retention characteristics are some of the strongest. While small businesses typically have low retention because of budget constraints and their high failure rate, an address is one of the stickiest assets: it's hard to remember every form that's been filled out, and it's not a safe bet that there won't be important mail—tax bills, legal documents, and other important messages are more likely to be sent by mail— so these customers tend to stick around.

Virtual mailbox providers, which also scan and digitally forward mail, charge up to $500/year. This is especially striking because these companies are not really logistics companies; they receive mail, but they don’t send it, so in principle, the business is not much more complicated than having a mailbox at a normal residence.

The opportunity is particularly ripe for ranking in search results using a longtail search keyword approach, as consumers search for terms like “virtual business address Fort Lauderdale”.