Just in time for Black Friday, eBay is offering New Yorkers a new way to sit out the madness. Instead of waiting in line, shoppers can use the eBay Now same-day delivery app to send eBay couriers to major chain stores to buy for them.
After being beta-tested in San Francisco in recent months, eBay Now is launching today for anyone with an iPhone south of 125th Street in Manhattan or in Brooklyn’s western reaches. Unlike similar offerings being tested by Walmart and Amazon, which rely on their own inventory, eBay Now works more like a peer-to-peer network, connecting shoppers with participating stores nearby while eBay acts as a go-between. And the stores aren’t obscure. Macy’s, Toys”R”Us, Target, and Best Buy are among what eBay says are hundreds of retailers taking part.
Also, unlike Walmart’s and Amazon’s offerings, eBay doesn’t require placing an order before a certain cutoff time. Its network of couriers, which it calls “valets,” are stationed throughout the city, with more personnel clustered around areas with higher concentrations of customers and stores. When a shopper places an order through the location-aware app, it goes out to the valet in the best place to fulfill the order the most quickly. The company promises to make most deliveries in an hour or so, though for now eBay valets have to wait in line at the checkout counter like everyone else. The minimum order is $25, shoppers can only order from one store per delivery, and there’s a $5 delivery fee.
The service fits eBay’s effort to re-brand itself as more than an auction site. The company wants people to think of eBay as a place to get anything and everything. And as the distinctions between offline and online retail fall away, eBay also wants shoppers to feel like they can get their stuff whenever, wherever, and however they want.
Short of opening their own stores, the network of retailers participating in eBay Now give eBay a surrogate physical footprint, and a way to approximate the immediacy of walking into an actual store. In a way, eBay Now doesn’t stray that far from the company’s roots: Just think of the stores as typical eBay sellers, except with more inventory.
Launching eBay Now in New York also invites the inevitable comparisons to famous dotcom-bubble failure Kozmo.com, which used bike messengers to bring New Yorkers just about anything in about an hour. Unlike Kozmo, however, same-day delivery isn’t eBay’s core business. Kozmo also didn’t charge a delivery fee or require a minimum order amount. (Also, eBay’s couriers use their own cars.)
As a company that survived the first dotcom bust and sees tens of billions of dollars in transactions move across its network each year, eBay has no doubt done the math to figure out how same-day fits into their business plans. EBay Now isn’t so much a reinvention as a small-scale investment in new infrastructure — infrastructure eBay needs to have in place as the anytime, anywhere, any way model of retail catalyzed by smartphones evolves from novelty to norm.
EBay's P2P Same-Day Delivery App Launches in NYC
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EBay's P2P Same-Day Delivery App Launches in NYC
