Last updated 1 November 2026
The delivery market in Nairobi is full of providers offering to collect from wherever you are. On its own that is no longer a distinguishing feature — it is the baseline. What decides whether a pickup is actually useful is everything that happens between the collection and the handover.
That is the part Pinned was built around. Technology has changed how deliveries are collected and dropped, and Nairobi has adopted it as quickly as anywhere in Africa. Where sending something once meant taking it to an office during office hours, a parcel can now leave from a doorstep, a shop counter, or a Pod that happens to be on the way.
The two shapes a pickup takes
A runner can collect from you and take the parcel to the receiver's door. Or a runner can collect from you and leave it at a Pod near the receiver, for them to collect when it suits.
The second one is quietly the more useful of the two for a lot of people. It separates your availability from theirs. You do not have to be free at the same time as the person receiving the parcel, and neither of you has to guess when the other will be.
What you are checking before you hand anything over
A pickup puts a stranger at your door, so the verification runs in both directions and it runs before the parcel changes hands.
When the booking is made, both you and the receiver are told who is coming. Before you release the parcel, check the runner against the identification number shown on the platform, and take the six-digit handover code tied to that parcel. Only the right runner has both.
That matters most when you are sending several things at once. A business dispatching four parcels in an afternoon has four codes, not one, and each code only closes its own trip. The right parcel goes to the right runner because the codes do not interchange.
How quickly a runner reaches you
Pinned works with a network of runners in the hundreds across Nairobi, and the platform looks for the closest one to you the moment you book.
How fast the parcel then moves is a separate question, and it is the one you answer when you choose a speed. Express is the fastest and aims for about an hour. Priority goes ahead of Standard in the queue. Standard aims for about two hours, same day. Overnight arrives the following morning. These are targets rather than guarantees — traffic in Nairobi gets a vote.