
Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service - Spendar89
http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/31/postmates-launches-amazon-prime-style-subscription-service-hits-1-million-monthly-deliveries/
======
bluetidepro
> "Postmates is limiting the free deliveries to orders over $30, which make up
> about 50% of the orders"

1\. I guess as a single person, I don't fall in this 50%. I never have orders
that large, which makes this service something I'm obviously not that
interested in. They should have made it appeal to all 100% of their users,
like Amazon Prime. They could have made it so it was free delivery based on
just select places where it made sense. Why cut off 50% of your user base for
the subscription service?

> "..free delivery on all orders from over 3,000 Plus merchants..."

2\. This is incredibly misleading. "over 3,000" has to refer to their entire
market because here in Chicago, I've only ever seen about 10-15 places that
show up in the "Plus" section. That's a pretty limited amount of restaurants
in the "Plus". That list has also only changed maybe once or twice in the
months they have had "Plus". And it's a very small variety (of honestly, not
that amazing places). I wonder with the addition of this service they actually
end up beefing that number up in their various markets because right now, that
stat is just marketing fluff.

As you can see on my two points above, I'm not sold this is going to play out
anywhere as well as Amazon Prime did. I bet they see a pretty slow adoption
rate on this until they make it much more compelling. Or I also assume a lot
of people are going to sign up for this only to be disappointed by the lack of
options I mentioned in my 2nd note above. They are definitely marketing it in
a misleading way.

Also, it's worth mentioning that Postmates has one of the worst custom support
teams I've ever seen. On two separate occasions I have sent an order issues
support ticket to never get a response back. Which was even more frustrating
when it said they always get back to you within 24 hours after I submitted the
issues. I had to eventually complain about it on Twitter before I finally got
a reply from them. Quite the bummer.

EDIT: I do want to add a quick note to this. While I'm very critical above, I
do indeed think Postmates has the best UX and app of the similar services
available. Once they can just iron out some of the kinks I mentioned above, I
think the potential of the service is indeed high.

~~~
bastian
Postmates Co-founder here:

1\. We will bring this down over time, give us a few weeks. ;)

2\. We have over 3,000 Plus merchants across the markets we're operating in. I
can't think of a direct competitor who has more and we're adding many, many
every week.

3\. Our customer service has been suffering lately - this is a totally valid
point. At some point we didn't catch up well enough with our growth. I'm
personally working with the team and we're doing many things to improve this.
I hope we can move the needle here soon.

~~~
bluetidepro
I appreciate the (quick) response, bastian! I do like the UX of Postmates, and
I hope this subscription service ends up panning out well for everyone! I
don't think I'm in that target market for the subscription service just yet,
but I will be excited when I am! Hoping you can ramp up the CX side of things,
too. Best of luck to you and your team!

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sshumaker
Between my wife and myself, I've ordered from Postmates over a hundred times.
But we barely use the service anymore because it has gotten so unreliable.

Even aside from the frequent "No Postmates are available", a large number of
orders have issues, from excessive delays to missing items to even orders that
don't show up. And while they eventually get taken care of by customer
support, after waiting for two hours for dinner only to find out it's not
coming, getting a refund is small consolation.

(I almost feel like sometime last year they switched to a model where the
delivery person places the order instead of a call center. If that's true, it
would help explain the drop in timeliness).

So while the app UX is decent the overall user experience leaves a lot to be
desired.

I realize it's a different model, but we have way better luck with caviar.

~~~
bastian
I 100% agree. We faced some pretty crazy challenges in scaling our support
team. Placing orders from over 50K merchants (per month) is not a simple task
BUT i'm not trying to find excuses here. We're doing the right things and they
will hopefully move the needle. If you order from our Plus merchants, the
order is placed electronically and this reduces the error rate drastically.
Email me at: bastian@postmates.com and i will mark your account with a free
subscription so you can try it out.

~~~
pbarnes_1
I say this having ordered probably 1000+ times through Postmates: It's not
about the merchant. It's about the delivery.

Your dispatch system needs an overhaul. It has improved again lately but there
was a period of several months when not a single Postmates delivery went right
for me, and I'm in SOMA, and only order from restaurants around here.

I used to be 100% Postmates, spending maybe $2k/m but now I'm this:

    
    
      IF HOT FOOD REQUIRED:
        IS AVAILABLE ON UBER EATS:
          UBER EATS
        ELSE
          POSTMATES
      ELSE
        DOORDASH
    

UberEats is unfortunately a much better experience than Postmates now. :/

~~~
bastian
I can guarantee you that we will be relentless in improving dispatch, ordering
and customer service. Recent changes dropped our average delivery times. In
April we will switch to an auto-accept mode for all deliveries and we will
also aggressively target faster pick-up times. Sorry we've let you down
pbarnes.

~~~
pbarnes_1
Eh, dispatch is hard, especially for what I guess is 95%+ food orders where
the difference between happy and unhappy is 10-15 minutes.

I used to work for a large courier company writing dispatch algos so... pet
peeve. :)

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ghayes
> In order not to lose money, Postmates is limiting the free deliveries to
> orders over $30, which make up about 50% of the orders on Postmates.

New employee here (just joined this week) -- one of the things that I find so
compelling about Postmates is that it's focused on building a profitable
business, without having to subsidize orders.

~~~
mbesto
> one of the things that I find so compelling about Postmates is that it's
> focused on building a profitable business, without having to subsidize
> orders.

So, like...ummm... a real business?

~~~
CPLX
Don't tell anyone but that's kind of unusual around these parts.

~~~
joshmn
This must be the secret sauce I keep hearing about!

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gkop
The article mentions "merchant" over and over again and never "restaurant".
Does this mean Postmates has shifted its focus away from restaurants?

Edit: thanks for the replies below. Restaurants are the vendors where I most
often find myself wanting something very specific delivered in a timely manner
and been willing to pay a small premium - Postmates serves this use case
better than any other service - glad to hear you will continue to support it
even as you invest in other markets as well!

~~~
ananddass
Disclosure: I am on the B.D & partnerships team on Postmates.

We haven't shifted focus away from restaurants. We have about 3000 Plus
partners today of which a majority are restaurants. We've always done more
than restaurants. Food is most of what we do but there are also grocery,
apparel, electronics, essentials retailers on Postmates.

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stephenitis
I feel like uber deliveries, postmates, amazon prime, google express are all
converging towards similar business models.

~~~
losteric
I'd say Amazon Prime is a different animal entirely, but Prime Now and all
those other businesses are all focused on building a new "last-mile" delivery
model (with some nuances around point-to-point delivery vs warehouse
fulfillment)

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free2rhyme214
I feel like Postmates will be acquired by Amazon or Google. Then again
DoorDash intended to do more than food in the beginning, so I wouldn't be
surprised to see them challenge Postmates soon.

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theapology
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can only upgrade to this service of PostMates
if you have an iPhone? That seems kinda odd...

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mrgoldenbrown
I went to postmates.com and saw they supported Boston. Great! So I enter my
address, and then get an error message saying they don't support my area, why
don't I browse their list of current cities - which includes Boston. Is there
a map somewhere of the subset of Boston they actually support?

~~~
magerleagues
[http://zones.postmates.com/](http://zones.postmates.com/)

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DanBlake
Anyone have any math on how many orders / how much you would have to spend a
month to make this worthwhile?

