Plug and Play CEO Corner: Santosh Gopal, Ship2MyID

What does your company do?

Ship2MyID is a patented shipping enablement platform that allows consumers to ship products to others without the need of the receiver’s mailing address. The world is going social and mobile. However, neither carry mailing addresses.



Without mailing addresses, products cannot be shipped. Ship2MyID comes as a shipping option at merchant checkout, where the buyer can provide either a cell phone number, email or any social media ID of the receiver, when they don’t have the actual mailing addresses. Ship2MyID takes care of the rest.



In a way, it is like PayPal for shipping. Ship2MyID provides 100% control to the receiver and they can control where to receive, whom to receive from and when to receive. Addresses are never shared between users or sold to third parties. We plan to start with online gifting and social samples, and then get into offline shipping without addresses.



How do retailers leverage your solution?

Ship2MyID offers an easy integration to merchant checkout. It has been designed to seamlessly adapt to the changing structure of mobile commerce, without changing the buying behavior of the consumers. Some of the benefits to retailers are generating new transactions, which were not possible before.



In addition, with every new transaction, the retailer gets a new impression and a new prospect who is already using a product Retailers can also leverage the growing community of Ship2MyID users, who are habituated to shop without mailing addresses, as well as sell more gifts easily while cutting down marketing costs.



Retailers can also generate dynamic recommendations based on future social events and book transactions in advance, as well as obtain an omnichannel view of a customer



What led to the development of the company?

I have more than 25 years of experience in technology-related business including software education, outsourced product development, digital publishing, direct marketing and gifting marketplaces. Ship2MyID represents an “address-free” future and was born out of the expectations of a seven-year-old Millennial kid waiting on the shipment of his tablet. He had received an email about the shipment while he was in Virginia, but the tablet shipped to his home address in California. He wondered, “If email can find me in Virginia, why can’t my shipment come there too?”



Millennial kids want the freedom and flexibility of a virtual world. With Internet comes convenience, accessibility and privacy, and all this is driving the digital world exponentially. Ship2MyID aims to bring those digital world benefits to the “real world.”



Plug and Play is a global accelerator brings together retailers and tech start-ups that offer specific technology and expertise that can relieve merchants’ pain points. Chain Store Age’s Customer Disruption newsletter provides a Q&A with the CEO of one of those companies in each issue.