This startup allows you to get travellers buy you your favorite overseas products

Say goodbye to exorbitant shipping costs.

Have you ever wanted a certain product from a particular country so bad but you’re restrained from buying it due to expensive shipping costs? Fret no more because with Airfrov, you can get travellers to buy overseas products for you at a negotiable cost.

Airfrov is a peer-to-peer shopping platform for users to get products from overseas by getting travellers to bring them back. Requestors who want something and are willing to pay just have to post their request. Travellers who are able to help will make an offer, bring the requested item back and earn extra money by utilising their extra luggage space.

Airfrov is founded by Cai Li and Robi Ng, who are both 29 years old. The two founders were classmates and co-founded another e-commerce start up in 2008, which gave them a lot of lessons for entrepreneurship to build another startup like Airfrov.

Airfrov started with Cai’s experience when he was helping his girlfriend buy items from overseas whenever he travels for business. Airfrov aims to solve the problems of requestors like Cai’s girlfriend by providing the accessibility to buy unique and location-specific products, or products with huge price disparity, save on exorbitant shipping cost and for travellers to build a new way to monetize their extra capacity.

According to Cai, instead of the usual ‘selling’ platform, Airfrov is a demand-driven platform whereby requests are put up. For many products, he said, Airfrov is the first platform to have them, as users start posting request before it is even available in stores. He further said that with the help of travellers who are physically present in various countries, their users now have ‘friends’ all over the world to assist with their shopping!

“Since we are capitalising on the extra capacity, users do not have to pay additional shipping charges as compared to other local buyers service. Airfrov is also working on a price recommendation service based on our data that can help give users a much better idea on what price to pay,” Cai explained.

To jumpstart their operations, Airfrov took part in IdeasInc, a business competition organised by NTU in 2014.They had investments from the folks at Spaze Ventures for a sum of <$100,000 shortly after the competition.

Currently, Cai said that they are still focusing on improving the user experience and building up their Android app. They are also looking at expanding to other neighbouring countries in 2016 and replicating their model.

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COMPANY PROFILE

Company Name: Airfrov
Founders: Cai Li and Robi Ng
Website: www.airfrov.com
Total funding at hand: SGD<100,000
Source of funding: Spaze Venture, iJam
Major investors: Spaze Venture
Start of Operation: January 2015  

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at research@charltonmediamail.com