The mobile shopping app Spring, as well as UberRush, are part of the testing phase of this platform, e-commercefacts.com reports. Spring offers a testing ground for this type of service, as it already has its own back-end of merchants to list the exact amount and type of inventory available on the Spring platform at any given time.
During the testing phase Spring and UberRush are offered to some companies, such as illesteva, Bing Bang Jewelry, Phyllis and Rosie, Mack Weldon and Ourdoor Voices. Those vendors have to list the daily available inventory as opposed to weekly or monthly when using the combination of the Spring app and UberRush. There are over 400 different merchants currently in talks with Uber for same-day delivery. However, the more traditional retailers will have a harder time transitioning to a system that requires data around exact inventory that is locally available throughout the day.
Morever, there are indications that the company has plans to build a separate app just for merchants deliveries, which hints to Uber’s agenda in optimising the delivery systems throughout the market. UberRush has been piloting with multiple retailers for 2014 and had made investments in delivering fresh produce with UberFresh, as well as the recent launch of UberEats in a number of US cities. The ultimate goals is to enable delivery of both human passengers and Uber Merchants orders at the same time through intelligent routing systems, all from a single driver-side app.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now