Powering On-Demand Logistics
OVERVIEW
Today we’re excited to announce the launch of our Postmates API, featuring an initial group of six partners. The Postmates API allows any developer to integrate fast and scalable local, on-demand delivery into their products, websites and apps. It also gives developers access to a delivery fleet of 6,000 drivers and riders in 18 US markets.
Our initial partners for the API launch include Everlane, Curbside, MeUndies, L., Threadflip and Betabrand, with many more to be announced in the coming weeks. All of our partners are using the Postmates API to solve individual logistical challenges.
Everlane has created an entirely new shopping experience called Everlane Now, offering access to basic items in New York and San Francisco within minutes and with great success. Threadflip is using Postmates to have clothing delivered from their sellers to their fulfillment center, while Curbside is extending their existing local pick-up business with an option to have shopping items from partners such as Target delivered on the same day.
POWERING LOCAL COMMERCE
Since the launch of Postmates over two years ago, it has been our vision to provide a reliable infrastructure for on-demand deliveries in every major metropolitan area in the world. And while we stayed focused on food delivery as a vehicle for growth, we’ve always been fascinated by how our customers use Postmates to hack their cities. We’re hackers ourselves, so observing the ways in which other people hacked our product gave us great satisfaction and added to the belief that cities would benefit from an open delivery infrastructure.
By default, Postmates was designed to be open and without strict categories. The idea that you can enter any store or address, specify an item and have it not only delivered but also purchased at the pick-up allowed our customers to tailor Postmates to their needs and to come up with creative ideas for applying Postmates to their businesses.
One of the early use cases we discovered — and one that we were most surprised by — was presented by local bike shop Mission Bicycle. They started using Postmates to deliver bike frames to and from their paint shop in South San Francisco, many times a week. As a result, Mission Bicycle was able enhance their supply chain — an otherwise costly and staff-intensive project — with the touch of a button. They were clearly onto something.
CALLING STARTUPS & PARTNERS
Having just completed over 1 million deliveries and learning a lot from our early partners, we believe that this is the right time to invite developers to build on top of the Postmates platform. Not only because we have much greater capacity to handle additional demand, but also because there are too many good ideas out there that require an infrastructure like Postmates. We simply can’t build them all ourselves, but others may find it useful to have access to both our infrastructure and our fleet, on top of which they can build their apps.
We’re especially interested in the areas of Supply Chain Logistics, Healthcare Services and Groceries & Produce. We’ve outlined them in more detail in a Request for Partners here, and we’re powering the best ideas by offering a total of $100,000 in delivery credits.
We hope that many of you will use our API to connect your city in new and exciting ways. We challenge you to provide local retail with a way to compete with Amazon, to design services that offer catering and delivery to hospitalized individuals, and to change the way that we shop for groceries and produce.
Amazon would not have been possible without Fedex or UPS. Imagine what can be built on top of Postmates.
Visit the Developer Site to learn more.
Written by Bastian Lehmann, Co-founder and CEO, Postmates
