clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

eBay Finally Kills Off Its Same-Day Delivery Service in the U.S.

It had struggled to compete in the space against Amazon, Google and well-funded startups such as Instacart and Postmates.

Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.

In October, eBay’s then-CEO telegraphed that the company’s same-day delivery service, eBay Now, was on the chopping block. Today, the company finally made it official.

In a a blog post, eBay said it was discontinuing the service and shutting down a pilot test in Brooklyn, the only remaining remnant of a multiyear delivery initiative that at one point included a standalone eBay Now app. The company positioned the move as part of a broader push to simplify eBay’s buying experience, which will include folding several standalone apps such as eBay Motors and eBay Fashion into the company’s main shopping app.

Either way, the initiative seemed like a stretch for eBay, since it had little experience in delivering goods to customers’ doors. It acquired a startup called Shutl to help lead the project, but it still struggled to compete in the space as Amazon, Google and well-funded startups such as Instacart and Postmates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get orders in customers’ hands as quickly as possible.

EBay said it will continue to experiment with customer options for ordering online and picking up at stores, where it has seen some success.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.