Uber starts delivering the goods, literally, with new courier service
IMAGE: SCREENGRAB, MASHABLE
Uber is pushing hard to prove it doesn't just have to be for rides.
Uber on Wednesday announced plans to roll out a courier service for local businesses to deliver groceries, clothes, flowers and more to customers in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. The delivery service, called UberRush, had previously been in a lengthy testing period just in New York.
The expanded venture comes from the startup's aptly named UberEVERYTHING department, with the goal of pushing to expand on Uber's success with delivering rides to delivering, well, everything else — and also to deliver on its lofty $50 billion valuation from private investors.
As Travis Kalanick, Uber's brash CEO and cofounder, has repeatedly said in the past: “If we can get you a car in five minutes, we can get you anything in five minutes." That increasingly includes meal deliveries, through UberEats, and now other merchant deliveries through UberRush. Uber's goal: to be the button you press for rides, food, goods and more.
Uber is partnering with several ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, Bigcommerce and Delivery.com, to allow businesses of various sizes to tap into Uber's fleet of delivery people.
"When you tap into the UberRUSH network, you pay only for the deliveries you make. Nothing more," Uber says in its pitch to businesses to use UberRush. "And because couriers don't need to make roundtrips, you can actually expand your delivery zone."
The decision to double down on delivering goods puts Uber into closer competition with logistics businesses like FedEx as well as a host of on-demand delivery startups like Postmates, Instacart and DoorDash. Amazon also recently took a page from the Uber playbook and is hiring contractors to drive around delivering items to customers more quickly.
Uber's attempts to prove itself as a potential logistics powerhouse have had mixed success to date. It shut down a similar on-demand delivery experiment in Washington D.C. at the beginning of this year and reportedly lost out on big name delivery partnerships with Apple and Starbucks to Postmates.
No comments:
Post a Comment