Postmates delivers on-demand items, and gives you a pickup option, too

By Lulu Chang Published April 9, 2018

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Sometimes, convenience isn’t getting something delivered – it’s getting something ready for pickup. Postmates understands this notion, and now, the on-demand delivery startup is expanding its offerings by giving customers the option to order certain items for pickup.

For all those times when you don’t want to worry about beating the delivery person home or just aren’t entirely sure of when you’ll be able to retrieve that package from your front door, this offers the perfect alternative. Postmates will allow folks to order ahead, and collect their purchases at a predetermined time. The feature, aptly named Pickup, has been tested in San Francisco over the course of the last week, and a Postmates spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the new offering will launch officially sometime “in the next couple of weeks.”

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Already, even in these early stages, over 200 sellers are taking part of Pickup, which means that when it does go live, you’ll be able to choose from a wide variety of merchants.

“The idea around pickup is around expanding the retail experience to our merchants,” the Postmates representative noted. “It’s giving those merchants another tool to expand the reach.”

While San Francisco will be the first city in which Pickup is made available, the delivery startup also plans to expand this service to other major metropolises in the United States shortly thereafter. Both Los Angeles and New York are slated to get Pickup in the next couple of months.

This might not be the only change afoot for Postmates. Recode reported on Friday, April 6 that the company is in discussions with competitor DoorDash to merge the two businesses. This would bring together the two largest delivery startups in the U.S., and could help the duo compete against larger companies like GrubHub, or even Uber and Amazon, who have on-demand delivery programs of their own.

Of course, much of this remains conjecture, and Recode further reported that the discussions around the merger have been “on-again off-again” as there remain “several roadblocks,” including determining who would ultimately take the reins at a merged company. Apparently, neither DoorDash’s CEO Tony Xu nor Postmates’ CEO Bastian Lehmann are thrilled by the prospect of playing second fiddle.

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