eBay retires stand-alone, same-day delivery apps
When eBay Now first surfaced two years ago, it appeared in the guise of an iOS app that promised same-day delivery for products sold by local stores. The service managed to pick up some steam (or at least that's what company execs led us to believe) but after a burst of bad news over the summer, eBay's grand app experiment has finally bit the dust. Over the weekend, the company quietly pulled the eBay Now app from its spots in the iOS and Android app stores, a turn of events that Reuters called well ahead of time. Don't fret, though! The thing is, eBay Now's heart still beats -- it's just being transplanted into a different body.
You see, instead of ticking away within the context of a completely distinct eBay service with its own app, eBay's trying to bring that focus on super-fast deliveries to the website and mobile apps it's already nurturing. As far as eBay can tell, their customers would much rather buy things online and pick them up from a physical store (like, say a Toys "R" Us) rather than just shell out an additional $5 for someone to courier it to them. We wonder just how true that actually is, but really: who could blame them for bailing out of same-day deliveries? They're operationally expensive and logistically complicated. And who could forget that Google and Amazon -- two gargantuan companies with crazy resources to devote to researching logistical supremacy -- have sunk plenty of time into fleshing out their same-day delivery ambitions and neither of them are still quite where they want to be.
