eBay Still Trying To Make Same-Day Delivery Work

eBay on Tuesday (Dec. 16) announced that 80 small businesses in Brooklyn have joined the eBay Local program.

“We’ve been testing ‘last mile’ options for more than a year. We kicked off the program with a focus on large retailers to scale the program,” said Tom Allason, senior director of eBay’s Local initiatives. “Now we want to provide the same opportunities to small businesses, who are the core sellers on eBay.”

Late last month, eBay seemed to have pulled the plug on a different same-day delivery service called eBay Now. The latest from eBay paints that change differently. “On November 19, eBay migrated its same-day and scheduled delivery service, eBay Now, from a stand-alone

app onto the eBay website and into its core mobile apps. eBay users can now shop for what they want and choose to have the item shipped or delivered, or picked up in store, where offered,” eBay said in a statement.

TechCrunch said that the move is more of a repositioning.

“eBay’s newer focus is more about working with smaller sellers whose customers may prefer picking up items bought online in their local stores. To that end, eBay last year bought a same-day delivery startup Shutl, which uses a ‘click and collect’ model in the U.K. that allows shoppers to pickup their eBay purchases from retailer Argos. Meanwhile, for same-day deliveries, Shutl uses local couriers. eBay previously used valets to deliver packages in the U.S., but switched over to the Shutl platform here this spring, Reuters reported. Today, eBay is touting its eBay Local service, which is basically the rebranded eBay Now offering with the added pickup options,” the TechCrunch story said.