On-demand delivery startup Postmates has launched an Amazon Prime-like subscription service for free delivery. The program, called Postmates Plus Unlimited, is available to customers, merchants, and its community of drivers and riders, proving that any retailer, not just Amazon, can deliver a great deal to its customers.
While the name of the service is decidedly Amazon-like, the service itself remains true to Postmates’ Uber-style approach to local deliveries. For a monthly fee of $9.99, Postmates Plus Unlimited offers customers free delivery in less than an hour, on orders exceeding $30 from its more than 3,000 Postmates Plus merchant partners.
These partners include many restaurants along with retailers such as Starbucks, American Apparel, Walgreens and Trader Joe’s. The goal is to make online and offline local inventory accessible in every city, something Amazon is not able to effectively offer.
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For Postmates, which is now completing one million deliveries a month, the subscription service is expected to initially lower its margins, but it is designed to help recruit new merchant partners and add leverage to negotiate higher commission rates down the road. In the last 15 months, Postmates has driven over $350 million in sales to local economies.
“We’re willing to sacrifice a bit on our margins to give our customer a much better experience,” Sean Plaice, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer at Postmates, told Bloomberg. “We know that —ultimately, strategically —this is the business we want to build, something that’s affordable to everyone.”
