eBay shuts down same-day delivery service

This blog has covered a slew of announcements from companies that are looking to implement or improve their delivery services. This has included Amazon talking about drones and next day delivery, Google creating a retail delivery service with the same and next day delivery and eBay testing deploying a local delivery service called eBay Now. 

However, many of these companies are learning that logistics management is harder than it looks. According to a recent article from VentureBeat, two years after launching the eBay Now service, the company is sitting it down.

It started following the $75 million acquisition of same day delivery service Milo in 2012. Even with that head start, the platform struggled and at the end of April, the company let go of all of its "valet" drivers and transferred operations to a third party logistics and courier company.

The article features conversations with several former employees of the eBay Now department to find out how it went so wrong.

"The service definitely wasn't well-managed at all, and the respect for employees took a sudden turn for the worse after about a couple months of the service running," one former employee said. "I think around holiday time the service becomes pretty popular and useful, but outside of that they don't have enough orders on a consistent daily basis to keep it alive."

Another former employee said that it was more than just a delivery service and was more like a personal shopping service. Because of this, it required a special focus on every order, which was difficult to obtain under the model eBay was using.

Logistics is a complicated system and organizations need to be aware of it. With the help of a 3PL service, any company will be able to deploy a delivery service.