In a move that will likely come as no surprise, Uber has confirmed that it is shutting down its on-demand delivery service, UberRush. The service, which was conceived as an on-demand parcel delivery service for merchants, has been confirmed to be entering its final days. Tech Crunch reports that those who make use of the service have received an email informing them that UberRush will cease operations on July 30 of this year.
“We’re winding down UberRUSH deliveries and ending services by the end of June,” an Uber representative told Tech Crunch. “We’re thankful for our partners and hope the next three months will allow them to make arrangements for their delivery needs. We’re already applying a lot of the lessons we learned together to our UberEats food delivery business in over 200 global markets across more than 100,000 restaurants.”
Launched in New York City in 2014 before expanding to Chicago and San Francisco, UberRush allowed customers to request deliveries for small packages, though it made exceptions for things such as guns, animals, and illegal drugs. However, the service does not appear to have been too successful. A large part of that might be the fact that, during the early period of its existence, UberRush was mostly used by restaurants as a way of handling food deliveries. Last year, Uber felt that Rush was competing too much with UberEats and told restaurants that they would have to make the switch over to Uber Eats.
Whereas UberRush never made it outside of those three cities, UberEats is available pretty much everywhere in the United States from New York City to small towns. It has also expanded outside of the United States to multiple different countries.
UberRush is not the only such service to meets its end in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Shyp announced that it would be shutting down. The on-demand shipping service offered services similar to those offered by UberRush. Unlike Uber’s offering, Shyp never made it out of the Bay Area and the company shut down after failing to meet several of its target goals.
Overall, it seems that on-demand shipping simply isn’t ready for prime time. With the USPS, FedEx, and UPS all being well-established, it may be very difficult for start-ups to break in, whereas food delivery services are something that many restaurants can afford to outsource.
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