This is a elegant writeup that explains how instacart works with detail that I feel like I've never seen from other companies that face similar challenges (uber, doordash). Thank you to the authors!
> DoorDash, Shipt, and Uber Eats in the United States, and Buymie, Deliveroo, and Grofers, based elsewhere
They all lose money.
So how do we know any of this is actually working?
To have one person shopping in store and then another one to deliver to your door is low productivity and almost guaranteed to cost more than most people are willing to pay for the service, unless this is in a developing country like India and China where you have both people with Western purchasing power and people that can be paid peanuts.
Same for services like Deliveroo, a driver cannot make that many deliveries per hour in most locations. It has historically worked for things like pizzas because pizzas are very simple, quick, and cheap so you can have someone on minimum wage do deliveries and still be in the black but as soon as you move to things with more overhead and lower margins you hit the wall.
Delivery is indeed the difficulty and the solution depends on the coming of age of self-driving cars (level 5). My experience of ordering online from supermarkets is that a guy drives a van around and takes your order to your front door. In suburban areas (i.e. houses not flats) we can imagine self-driving vans stopping in front of your houses and letting you collect your order like a vending machine. This is not possible now because there are no self-driving cars but the instant they become commercially available I bet this will quickly become the norm.
Automated warehouses plus self-driving cars enable a fully automated process from order to delivery. I'm sure we'll get there.
Drones are simpler to fly autonomously but I don't think they are practical for delivering 10s of kilos of stuff to residential areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x05SFt9BN0w
As long as the max. Delivery matches the biggest package possible, since drones have a way cheaper cost of ownership + delivery + quicker.
Also, the last mile is really, really expensive to service, as every startup in this space finds out sooner rather than later.
The moment a competitor starts offering self-driving option for the general public, there won't be any reason to use Uber Car.
A single 10 mile trip back and forth to downtown will easily cost you 100$+ without tips and 8 times out of 10 it'll be in a filthy and smelly car with a driver who doesn't care about the speed limit or the volume or genre of music he's playing in the car.
Those promos for restaurants, couriers and consumers don’t pay for themselves.