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Dive Brief:
- Maersk is planning upgrades to Maersk E-Commerce, its service leveraging a network of national and regional carriers to deliver packages, Sam Coiro, the company’s head of global business development for e-commerce, told Supply Chain Dive.
- Upcoming improvements include developing additional features Maersk’s premium customers are demanding, such as picture proof of delivery, signature upon delivery parameters and real-time “turn-by-turn” text updates showing the driver’s progress on a route, Coiro said in an interview last month. Those features are currently slated for full customer access in 2026, a spokesperson told Supply Chain Dive.
- Maersk may also deploy its own vehicles to make U.S. deliveries where there’s enough volume to justify such an operation. “If you’re in New York, potentially you will eventually start seeing a Maersk truck show up to your door to deliver the good, but that’s several quarters away,” Coiro said.
Dive Insight:
Ocean shipping titan Maersk wants to make a bigger splash in the parcel delivery world. The upgrades could help the company in its efforts to take “as much market share as possible” from smaller parcel carriers outside the likes of UPS, FedEx and Amazon, according to Coiro.
“We believe we have a very compelling offer in that market,” he said.
Maersk E-Commerce offers parcel delivery via its two service levels: standard, which offers delivery in two to five days, and expedited, which delivers in two to five days. Coiro said standard’s average delivery time is 3.8 days, while expedited is 2.4 days.
The bones of Maersk E-Commerce’s U.S. delivery capabilities originate from its acquisition of Visible Supply Chain Management in 2021. Its multi-carrier network has advantages over standard delivery providers, Coiro said. If a particular carrier is underperforming, Maersk routes volume to others in its network to ensure service reliability.
Coiro declined to name the specific carriers Maersk uses, but noted that the combination gives it 100% delivery coverage across the U.S. The solution works for a range of customer types, but Coiro noted it could be particularly helpful for shippers without the volume to secure heavy rate discounts from national carriers directly.
Some companies offering similar multi-carrier solutions have struggled to find success in a parcel market steeped in competition. Maergo shut down last year in the face of intense pricing competition from FedEx and UPS, while Pandion closed its doors in January as funding fizzled out.
Coiro said Maersk E-Commerce’s advantage over those shuttered companies is its end-to-end supply chain capabilities, allowing shippers to leverage a wider array of logistics services beyond just parcel delivery.
One example Coiro provided was Maersk’s recent interaction with a large subscription provider shipping around 1 million boxes monthly. The company mentioned it was having trouble moving goods out of Asia and into other markets, which generated a separate conversation about potential Maersk solutions, Coiro said.
“It seems that there are more and more shippers out there looking for partners that have more breadth in the supply chain and can probably give them a better price across the board,” he said.
