Shiply vs Uship
I started blogging everyday to document my day and my thoughts but it seems it’s starting to becoming something different, today I’m not going to mention anything I’ve done today or any of my thoughts of the day. I’m going to address the Shiply vs Uship debate thats been brought to my attention after a Uship employee Correction: Fred Wright is not a Uship employee, he is a user of the uship service and owner of a transport company. commented on my article on the Shell Livewire young entrepreneur of the year awards.
I’ll start of by saying I am not a journalist, I will attempt to be unbias but I am entitled to my own opinion. I do not plan to come to a verdict or get further involved with this debate, I believe that is for the two companies to sort out between them, I mealy plan to lay out the facts as I see them and leave it up to you as the reader to make your own decision.
So let me lay the situation bare. Uship is an American company who allow users to search for the best way to ship they’re goods. They believe they were first to this market and believe that Shiply, a UK based company have copied their idea, even down to the design of their website. It is true that Shiply does provide the same or very similar service to Uship but there are plenty of companies around the world that provide the same service as others so is that wrong? What makes this even more interesting is Uship’s recent move into the UK market.
As a way of comparison I am going to insert a number of pages from the two companies websites and compare them, It is my personal opinion that to copy an idea that is not legally protected in a different market is not wrong and can be very rewarding, some great companies have been born out of this and I’m sure many more will in the future. However to blatantly rip off the design or implementation of another companies product does seem to bring about some questions, anyway I’ll let you decide.
Uship Homepage
Shiply Homepage
Looks ok at the moment, both companies clearly do the roughly the same thing but they don’t stand out as being the same design.
Uship Search Page
Shiply Search Page
I have to say these look pretty similar, but then again how different can you make a search page, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
I contacted both companies press offices but I have only heard back from Uship. I felt it important to give both companies a space to give their opinions and even though I haven’t heard from Shiply if I do get a response I will added it in. Here’s what Dean Jutilla at Uship had to say…
uShip launched its global transport marketplace over five years ago, and during that time over £80 million of business has transacted through our site. We’re definitely proud of what we’ve built – 800,000 users, 600,000 listings and 150,000 registered transporters shipments across 100 countries.
Whilst uShip is based in the U.S., our platform has supported global users and shipments since 2005. Our recent enhancements and efforts in Canada and the UK are a result of our desire to better serve our customers and partners who operate in those countries and not a response to any specific competitor. Looking forward, we will be aggressively rolling out enhanced support from many other countries, languages, currencies, time zones, measurement standards and more.
He also said it was not Uship’s policy to comment on other companies practice and said it was up to the consumer to decide wether or not intellectual property had been violated.
As I said earlier I am not going to come to a verdict as to who is right, to be honest I don’t care who copied who, or if anyone did. I wish both companies the best of luck. However I am going to voice my opinion on what they should do going forward. As I said in the comments on my Shell Livewire post I don’t believe either company should spend time worrying who copied who. This will only take away from the main aim of providing the customer the best possible product they can. If your the best at what you do people will use your service over your competitors, end off. If it were me I would be spending my time working on how to make my service far better than my competitors, I’d want to crush them and the only way I know how to do that is by being better than them in they eyes of the people that matter most, my customers. To me playing legal games and moaning about who had the idea first is not the way to win the game.
I’ll finish up with this thought. Near where I live there are two coffee shops almost next door to each-other. One has a Starbucks sign outside and one has a Costa sign outside. At the end of the day they both provide me with the same product (in my case a black americano), but they do it in their own unique way. It’s that that differentiates them and is why I always choose one over the other. Competition is brilliant, it brings out the best in people and companies so embrace it and out innovate your competition if you want to win the game.
Cheers guys.
