eBay considered rolling out a scheduled delivery service last year. A Tamebay readers stumbled upon a hidden page and spilt the beans along with the screen shot below.
The eBay Scheduled Delivery service aims to deliver items to the buyer at the time that they’ve requested. Time slots available are between 9:00am and 9:00pm Monday to Saturday or 9:00am and 6:00pm on Sunday. The service does however rely on the participating retailer having a store open in your area so that the goods can be despatched.
This trial, apparently considered last year according to the screen shot, would appear to have been shelved. It’s reminiscent of the retired US based eBay Now same-day and scheduled delivery which ended in the middle of 2015 and was powered by shutl.
Is that the last we’ll hear of eBay Scheduled Delivery?
So eBay look like they’ve scrapped the program, but that may not be the end. We’re waiting to see what fall out there is from the Sainsbury’s takeover of Argos and how that impacts eBay’s Click & Collect program.
It might be a disaster if Sainsbury’s decide they don’t like it, but that’s unlikely as you can already Click & Collect from Argos concessions in Sainsbury’s stores.
Alternatively it could be the best thing that ever happened for eBay, if Sainsbury’s decide to allow eBay Click & Collect from all their supermarkets, regardless if there’s an Argos concession.
We do know that Argos with their Fast Track home delivery service offers Argos customers 7am-10am; 10am-1pm; 2pm-6pm; or 7pm-10pm time slots for home delivery. We’d love to see the return of eBay Now in the UK in conjunction with eBay’s Argos partnership. Imagine your get notification that your item arrived at your local Argos and you can now choose either to collect it, or have it delivered the same day or a later day in a time slot of your choosing.
We reckon it’ll take a good couple of months for Sainsbury’s and Argos to sort themselves out, but a return of eBay Now via Argos to the UK would get eBay a lot closer to Amazon in terms of their delivery capability.
5 Responses
Well, its probably ebay money that paid for the argos one day delivery roll out – argos lost half thier profits this year, down from 5% to 2.5 so not a time to invest – its probably ebay money behind the Sainsbury bid which kind of makes sense if you think about it. Its a good time to watch share prices.
Well looking at the new delivery metrics…. more woes could be on the way. Already we find that just because you have proof of posting and proof that the courier tried to deliver on time, it doesn’t protect you from the customer not being in and saying not delivered on time! So when will the metric be? Will it be when it arrives at argos? or the day they collect or when they asked for it to be delivered….? What if they arrange for argos to deliver…. will they have to pay extra? What if argos dont deliver on time?
To be honest when Ebay can’t even get the simplest of things right this one is justa nightmare wating to happen.
I gave up on click and collect as found a spike in orders coming back as not collected…. To easy to just change mind as dont even have to sort a return.
“Imagine your get notification that your item arrived at your local Argos and you can now choose either to collect it, or have it delivered the same day or a later day in a time slot of your choosing.”
That sounds good, but it means getting your goods a couple of days later, than by ordinary post or courier. Because the item is delivered to Argos on the day it would have been delivered direct to you, then it takes a day or two to process, before you can arrange delivery.