Postmates To Compete Amazon Prime Service

Postmates has launched a similar service to that of Prime in order to compete against Amazon in the market.

Amazon Inc. always has competitors right on its shoulders. It is the biggest online retailer in the United States and one of the biggest in the world, which is growing at 20 percent annually. The US retailer giant has surely become the reigning monarch of American online shopping and it is setting examples for the retail companies to follow in order to do business in the region. However, not all of it has been easy for the company to do.

Initially Amazon had competitors such as eBay, Wal-Mart and Best Buy etc. to challenge it for the market share but all these retailers have lost a bit of charm, and AMZN capitalized on it and took a major lead. Now new entries like Jet.com and Postmates are trying to give it a tough time. According to sources, Postmates has come up with an Amazon Prime like subscription service, which has received good response from the customers so far. It seeks to be completing 1 million package deliveries in a month as a part of making name in the e-commerce market.

The loyalty program of Postmates is known as Postmates Plus Unlimited which is a $9.99 per month subscription service. Members get free deliveries on all ‘Plus’ orders that exceed the minimum amount of $30 and the company will not service fees as well. American Apparel is one of the Plus merchants along with thousands of other partners on the platform. The company predicts and expects to have nearly 10,000 Plus merchants in 40 different US markets.

The service does sound like what Amazon offers to its customers through Prime membership. When Postmates officials were asked about competing with the US retailing giant, they replied that from the beginning Postmates has been ‘anti-Amazon’ and it seeks to compete Amazon for a market share in the market.

The Vice President of Growth at Postmates, Kristin Schaefer, said in a statement, “The goal is to make local inventory that’s offline and even online really accessible in every city. This is very counter to Amazon’s mission with warehouses. Over years, we’ve done a lot of time looking at Prime and trying to understand it and thinking about how the model can work for us. It’s been in the works for a long time.”

Postmates has managed to get sales valued at $350 million to the local economies in the past 15 months or so. This is a brilliant figure considering the tough competition in the market for an entirely new name in the industry. Schaefer added that Postmates does not follow the strategy of Amazon, as it is anti-Amazon whereas it considers that the US retailing giant is known for operating a brilliant business.

She added, “Over years, we’ve done a lot of time looking at Prime and trying to understand it and thinking about how the model can work for us. It’s been in the works for a long time.”