eBay Now: eBay's Same-Day Delivery Service

<< Previous

"About 90% of shopping is still done in physical stores. Within that context delivery plays make a lot of sense. About 75% of commerce actually happens 15 miles from home. Our ambition [is to] bridge the gap between online and offline through retail thru great tech, platforms, and experiences."

-Dane Glasgow, vice president, mobile & local at eBay, March 2013.

"We have some good relationships with retailers. We’re really trying to partner with them to try and offer a service that they perhaps couldn’t solve on their own."

-David Ramadge, eBay’s Head of Local Business Development, February 2013.

In August 2012, after Amazon.com announced its same-day service delivery, eBay invited select San Francisco customers to sample 'eBay Now' - its shopping application that boasted same-day delivery. The residents could download the application to their Apple iPhones and iPads, with products featured and sold directly by local stores. Once the customer hit the 'bring it' button, an eBay shopping valet picked up and delivered the item to the customer’s place of choice — office, home, or coffee shop. eBay waived the delivery fee for the first three purchases, which could not cost less than $25 each.

However, purchases made after that were delivered at a charge of $5. On October 10, 2012, the service was made available to all the residents of San Francisco. While the application was in its beta phase, the company had plans to add more cities depending on the reaction of the users to its application and service.

eBay aggregated individual retailers/mom-and-pop stores and offered them a platform to sell their merchandise, while giving buyers the convenience of shopping from home and getting the items delivered to their doorstep. Analysts opined that eBay had a location advantage to implement its same-day delivery services (when compared to competitors like Amazon.com) as it did not have to maintain any warehouses and the retailers (who stocked the goods) were naturally located close to their customers.

They opined that eBay would have an advantage in providing instant delivery. However, they were of the view that it was inevitable that eBay would face competition from many startups and well established companies as the retail scenario would change and same-day delivery service would be increasingly used by every retailer to expand their geographical reach. Moreover, operating a same-day delivery service was fraught with various risks and challenges and could snowball into a logistical nightmare for eBay.

Global E-Commerce Industry - Next Page>>

---

Custom Search

---

Operations Management Textbooks Collection	Operations Management Workbooks Collection	Case Studies in Operations Management - Vol. I Case Study Volumes Collection

---