As consumers have grown accustomed to having things shipped fast and cheap from the megaretailers that can afford it, there’s been a pushback of sorts to put local merchants back on the same pedestal they used to occupy. Now, Postmates and Shopify might have a solution for even the most conflicted shopper.
Delivery provider Postmates announced on Tuesday (May 3) that it had finalized a partnership with Shopify to extend each company’s online sales support and logistics suite to small and medium-sized businesses that haven’t been able to find a place in the massive online marketplaces that have come to dominate digital retail. Though the service is barely 12 hours old, Postmates said it’s already gone live in 200 cities across the U.S., including Los Angeles, where Jordan Schau, cofounder of Pure Fix Cycles, compared the suddenly available same-day shipping options Pure Fix now enjoys to those it was never able to affordably find among larger providers.
“Allowing our customers to access all of our cycling gear with Postmates same-day delivery is huge,” Schau said in a statement. “Within about two minutes of enabling it, we could offer unbeatable delivery to our customers. Take that, Amazon two-day delivery. I can’t wait to see couriers running around the city delivering bikes, tubes, tires and Pure Fix swag.”
Deliveries over the platform will run anywhere from $5 to $20, with Postmates collecting the entirety of the fees. Even though local retailers can’t hope to see any money from those deliveries, it might be enticing enough that options to join the express delivery craze are starting to present themselves without bankrupting anyone but Amazon.
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