On Wednesday Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) said it was expanding its same-day delivery service to 6 new metropolitan areas bringing to 10 the number of cities where Amazon Prime members can also get same-day delivery service for a charge of $5.99. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) said Thursday that it had expanded its Shipping Express Service to include book deliveries from Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS) stores in Manhattan, West Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Google already has same-day delivery partnerships in those metro areas with Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT), Costco Wholesale Corp. (NASDAQ: COST), Staples Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLS) according to a post at VentureBeat. eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) also operates a same-day delivery service, eBay Now, in five markets, but has shelved expansion plans that would have brought the service to another 20 U.S. cities.
There are other smaller players on the field as well, but for now the main competition appears to be between Amazon and Google. Both are surely willing to spend some serious cash to make same-day delivery work and while Amazon may appear to have a more legitimate stake in making same-day delivery a success, Google’s entry is more than just a nuisance to Amazon.
Google’s self-driving cars are a natural for this a service of this kind, and it’s pretty likely that driverless cars will be more acceptable to law enforcement agencies than Amazon’s proposed drone delivery service. It could turn out that Google licenses the driverless technologies to automakers which then sell self-driving vehicles to Amazon. Would that be what is known as a win-win scenario?
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