Skip to footer

Google offers same-day delivery service (with a few catches)

Google Shopping Express is a challenge to competitors such as Amazon. 

|
Google
Google Shopping Express will be rolled out initially to residents of the Bay Area.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Google has launched a same-day shopping and delivery service for residents of the Bay Area. 

Dubbed Google Shopping Express, the platform includes products from big-box stores such as Target, Staples, and Walgreens, and smaller, boutique outlets such as Blue Bottle Coffee. Users will place an order, select a delivery window, and see the product on their doorstep the same day.

 

In a blog post, Tom Fallows, a director at Google Shopping Express, said Google was "still working out our long-term pricing plan." But beginning this week, testers will get free delivery for a full six months. Some caveats: You've got to live in or around San Francisco, and you'll have to fill out this online form in order to be selected. No word yet on when Google might attempt a wider roll-out of Shopping Express, but later this year seems like a safe bet to us. 

So what's Google – which remains, with a few notable exceptions, mostly a Web services company – doing dabbling in delivery? Well, the short answer is that the Mountain View giant is attempting to head off similar ventures from its competitors. Amazon, for instance, has long sold and shipped a wide range of non-book items, from deodorant to trash bags and Ninja Blenders. 

"[We] see Google over time expanding toward a more traditional e-commerce marketplace model," Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian wrote in a note to investors obtained by Investor's Business Daily. "We believe the new service is consistent with Google's ambitions to create a larger commerce platform, bring more local product inventory into search, and also counter competition from Amazon and eBay." 

Google Shopping Express will be a boon to couch potatoes who can't be bothered to drive to Walgreens to get a can of shaving cream – that much is clear. But as Alexis Tsotsis of TechCrunch notes, Google Shopping Express will also help retailers. The benefits, she writes, include "increasing purchase volume from existing customers because of convenience." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Google offers same-day delivery service (with a few catches)
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0328/Google-offers-same-day-delivery-service-with-a-few-catches
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe