eBay Now: Home delivery at digital speeds

Amazon, Wal-mart, and eBay dive into same-day delivery.

|
Michael Sloan

Now that the Internet has people accustomed to getting music, videos, and information on demand, companies are racing to meet those expectations in the physical world.

Walmart.com dispatches employees from local stores to drop off goods at doorsteps. Amazon hawks groceries in some cities, with promised same-day delivery. And now eBay has hired an army of couriers to hand-deliver products.

"Our vision is to make eBay the most convenient way to shop locally," says Deborah Sharkey, vice president of local at eBay, in an e-mail. "eBay Now gives consumers a new way to shop whenever the moment of inspiration strikes, delivered to their exact location, within about an hour."

The eBay Now website functions as an online catalog for Target, Bloomingdale's, and other large chains. Customers can browse, fill up a digital shopping cart, and pay by credit card. Once someone places an order, eBay Now dispatches a "valet" to pick up the items from stores and deliver everything the same day.

To pull off this speedy feat, eBay Now sticks to cities. It has hired couriers in New York; Chicago; San Jose, Calif.; and San Francisco, with Dallas joining the list soon. The program plans to expand service to 25 new cities next year. This holiday, personal deliveries come at no additional cost. For the rest of the year, there's a $5 fee for each store a customer orders from.

Amazon and Wal-Mart have developed their own ways to make package deliveries feel more like pizza deliveries. Just this month, Amazon revealed plans to launch a fleet of aerial delivery drones. These small, pilotless helicopters could drop off packages within 30 minutes. But deployment will take several years, according to the company, as it finalizes the technology and waits for government approval.

Online companies have a troubled history with same-day delivery. In the late 1990s, Kozmo, Webvan, and UrbanFetch promised to pick up everything from video games to ice cream, often with no fee. The shuttered companies now exemplify the decadence of the dot-com days – thinking that free services at huge volume would somehow work out in the end.

Today's e-couriers hope to reverse the trend by building on already successful businesses. "We use technology to help retailers leverage existing assets (stores) to give customers what they want, when they want it," writes Ms. Sharkey.

For more on how technology intersects daily life, follow Chris on Twitter @venturenaut.

The original version of this article ran in the December 16 issue of the Christian Science Monitor magazine.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to eBay Now: Home delivery at digital speeds
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Tech/2013/1216/eBay-Now-Home-delivery-at-digital-speeds
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe