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Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service

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Re: Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service

#31

Post by bastian »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #28
bastian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 H…

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.

Re: Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service

#33

Post by Artistry121 »

bastian wrote: post #19
bluetidepro wrote: post #17

> "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…

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 worki…

I just used your service for the first time in Austin. I"m excited to see how it goes. The experience that I had through the online ordering portal my first time was near perfect. Wait time for delivery is acceptable too - although faster is always better.

This is a really tough industry to solve - particularly at the scale you are trying to solve it at - and managing growth concerns and the right markets to be in at the right time is really hard. Good job right now!

Re: Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service

#34

Post by a_small_island »

seanplaice wrote: post #16
melvinmt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without having to subsidize orders If there's another market player that is willing to subsidize orders and provide the same service as you (let's call them Amazon, Google, and Uber) then commanding a profit is not feasible, so I'm not sure if that's the right thing to be chasing at this moment, as Jeff Bezos famously said: "Your margin is my opportunity". On-demand delivery is increasingly becoming a commodity bus…

I think there is a difference between chasing profits and requiring them. Postmates is a market place and platform, for us to be successful we have to drive value to everyone that participates. That means driving value to our Postmates, customers and merchant partners. This also includes us, Postmates, as a participant of the platform. Maintaining strong unit economics ensures that we are building the right products…

>If you are subsidizing your unit economics and your competition drops prices they are forcing you to lose more money. We prefer seek efficiencies and pass those savings on instead of just spending more money.

Unless by subsidizing, this company takes more market share and causes the non-subsidizer to dip into their own margin, and the race to the bottom continues.

Re: Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service

#35

Post by pbarnes_1 »

bastian wrote: post #31
pbarnes_1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 H…

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.

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. :)

Re: Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service

#36

Post by ChrisDutrow »

bastian wrote: post #27
sshumaker wrote: post #25

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…

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…

Perhaps this is obvious, but after you feel like you've recovered and are again providing good service. You might consider finding all the customers who you might have provided bad service too and send them a nice coupon with an explanation of how/why things were wrong and why/how they have been made good again.

A lot of times your worst critics can become your biggest fans this way.

Re: Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service

#37

Post by 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?

Re: Postmates launches Amazon Prime-style subscription service

#38

Post by magerleagues »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #37

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?

http://zones.postmates.com/
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