For consumers, the state of ecommerce is good. You can get just about anything from Amazon shipped to you in two days (with free shipping if you have Amazon Prime). In terms of variety, you can discover and purchase anything from a custom iPad case from Etsy to Chicago pizza from Goldbely and have it delivered to your door. But as online shopping improves, it contrasts with purchasing something across town — which increasingly seems to be a hassle.
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The goal of Postmates, an iOS app currently live in three U.S. cities, is to make products across town as accessible as those online. While the app is fresh and new, employing a similar interface as Uber's, the concept behind it is classic: You request items and a courier contracted by Postmates will pick up the goods and bring them to you. You can pay or tip via the app.
If I could do one fewer errand each week, it would be grocery shopping. In Postmates, you can technically order from any business that's listed on Foursquare, since Postmates uses its API. But you'll want to choose a place for which Postmates has the full menu or product list in its app, or that you are familiar enough with the offerings to specify what product you want (and not be too surprised by the price). Since Postmates inputs itemized menus manually, the ones that are listed in-app are reliable.
I typically do my grocery shopping at Trader Joe's and am familiar enough with the store and its offerings that I can easily make a shopping list ahead of time. This made Postmates a perfect fit. The app listed most items I wanted, along with the prices of each — even specific items such as a certain brand of marinara sauce or mozzarella cheese — although I had to enter a few products myself (bananas, avocados and yogurt) without knowing the exact price.
Once I filled out my order, I sent it. It took a few minutes, but as soon as a Postmates courier had accepted, I got an email and a push notification to let me know my order was processing.
Right now, Postmates is live in New York City, but does not deliver to Brooklyn, where I live (although I'm told this is in the works). Thus, I had my groceries delivered to Mashable's office and then headed home on the subway. Getting groceries directly to my home would be fantastic, but getting work done for another hour while someone else did the shopping for me was still pretty useful.
I put in my order at 5:46 p.m. on a Friday. The Trader Joe's I ordered from was 0.6 miles away, according to the Postmates app. As soon as the Postmates courier accepted my order, I could see his location on the map in the app. He was only a few blocks away to start.
He hadn't been in the store for long when I got a call. He wanted to confirm which kind of yogurt I wanted, since I had written "unsweetened" and the store had "plain." "Yup, that sounds great," I told him. I realized that I hadn't put orange juice on my list so, since I had him on the phone, I asked if I could add it — I could, he replied, he would just need to call Postmates so they could increase the limit on his credit card that he'd use to check out.
We had about three conversations during the delivery. The store was actually out of flax bread so we opted for whole wheat, and got a different brand of bagels than what was listed in the app. At 6:32 p.m., he let me know he had everything and was in the checkout line.
Delivery was scheduled for 6:45 p.m., an hour after I put the order in, but having been to that Trader Joe's at that time of day in the past, I knew it would be crowded and the line would be long. Surprisingly, he got the order to me at 6:56 p.m., just over an hour after I had initially sent the order in.
All in all, getting groceries via Postmates was a good deal. I paid $40 for my groceries, the delivery was about $6, along with a service fee of $2 as well as a tip, which you calculate by selecting a percentage of your transaction when your order is delivered.
The other benefit of the Postmates app that I'll mention is the listings of local restaurants and other businesses nearby. Even if you don't need it delivered, the restaurants featured are solid recommendations that I may not have come across (or browsed menus of) otherwise.
Other apps such as Zaarly and Square Market are working to shine light on local merchants, while TaskRabbit matches you with people who run various errands for you. Postmates offers a more streamlined interaction, from discovery to delivery and payments. Most of all, it makes local commerce feel like ecommerce — in a good way.
Image: Postmates