eBay’s Ramping Up Drop-Off Services With FedEx

eBay and FedEx are pairing up to expand the eCommerce firm’s Valet service, which will be expanding it to 1,600 FedEx locations nationwide in the following few months.

The extension follows testing in Atlanta and the great Los Angeles areas — and is hoped to be the sort of energy shot eBay’s Valet service needs to get more sellers involved in actually trying the service.

Valet was designed to make it easier to sell goods on eBay instead of having to individually list and price each item they wanted to sell. Customers could instead simply send an entire shipment of goods to Valet, which is then tasked with all the sorting and tagging. For doing all that delightful grunt work, Valet collects a 10 percent to 20 percent commission. The program was started two years ago, but has seen tepid adoption.

The agreement between FedEx and eBay is a push to expand the service by taking the toughest and most friction-filled part — working through the USPS — out of the equation entirely.

It is also a partnership that draws to potential allies as Amazon — a long-time eBay rival — is expanding out its delivery capacity and is looking increasingly like a competitor of FedEx. Though FedEx executives have publicly expressed doubt that Amazon really wants to enter the market as an individual player in delivery logistics, it certainly seems like they have decided there is no harm in hedging their bets.