Uber Taps Rapid Delivery Partner Zapp to Drive Cross-Platform Spending

Ride-hailing company Uber Technologies announced Wednesday (Nov. 23) that it is partnering with the British 20-minute convenience delivery app Zapp to offer the latter’s products on the Uber Eats marketplace in Central London.

“We’re excited to partner with Zapp to offer round the clock convenience as one of the few 24/7 retailers on the platform,” Alex Troughton, head of commerce at Uber Eats U.K., said in an emailed press release. “We know that more and more customers are using Uber Eats to order those ‘need it now’ items and will enjoy shopping Zapp’s curated and premium catalogue.”

The move comes amid an ongoing push by Uber to grow its cross-vertical offerings to drive engagement with every part of its business. The company has observed that consumers that purchase from a given vertical within the company are more likely to adopt others.

“We are actively cross-selling food delivery consumers into grocery, grocery consumers into alcohol and then actually back now to mobility as well,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told analysts earlier this month. “So, all of the cross-sell that we have across the platform continues to increase, drive new customers and also drive retention as well.”

Uber has been growing its convenience offerings in recent years. In June 2021, the company kicked off a similar partnership with digital convenience retailer Gopuff to enable consumers to purchase goods from the startup through the Uber Eats marketplace, launching in 95 cities and expanding throughout that summer. The partnership remains live.

More recently, the company announced in March that it had entered into a partnership to have 3,000 bp convenience stores available on Uber Eats worldwide by 2025.

While Uber relies on partnerships to grow its convenience offerings, competitors DoorDash and Grubhub, while working with partners, both have own-brand digital convenience stores. In the summer of 2020, the former announced the launch of its DashMart online shop, and in February, Grubhub announced the launch of its DashMart competitor, Grubhub Goods.

“The restaurant delivery industry … has reached a certain level of penetration that something, say, grocery delivery or retail delivery or delivery from other types of stores has only reached a fraction of,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told analysts on a recent call.

He added that, with convenience delivery, many consumers find delivery is not worth the higher cost, as items do not always “show up faster than a consumer can shop on their own.” Consequently, he argues that the aggregator’s goal is to bring down the price of c-store delivery for consumers and to speed up the process. Yet, there is “a long road ahead.”

On the other hand, these digital c-store efforts are helped by significant consumer demand for same-day delivery of non-food items. According to data from the July edition of PYMNTS’ ConnectedEconomy series, “The ConnectedEconomy Monthly Report: The Rise of the Smart Home,” which drew from a survey of more than 2,600 U.S. consumers, about one in three consumers makes eCommerce purchases via same-day delivery aggregators each month.

Read the report: The ConnectedEconomy Monthly Report: The Rise of the Smart Home