> "Postmates is limiting the free deliveries to orders over $30, which make up about 50% of the orders"<p>1. I guess as a single person, I don't fall in this 50%. I never have orders that large, which makes this service something I'm obviously not that interested in. They should have made it appeal to all 100% of their users, like Amazon Prime. They could have made it so it was free delivery based on just select places where it made sense. Why cut off 50% of your user base for the subscription service?<p>> "..free delivery on all orders from over 3,000 Plus merchants..."<p>2. This is incredibly misleading. "over 3,000" has to refer to their entire market because here in Chicago, I've only ever seen about 10-15 places that show up in the "Plus" section. That's a pretty limited amount of restaurants in the "Plus". That list has also only changed maybe once or twice in the months they have had "Plus". And it's a very small variety (of honestly, not that amazing places). I wonder with the addition of this service they actually end up beefing that number up in their various markets because right now, that stat is just marketing fluff.<p>As you can see on my two points above, I'm not sold this is going to play out anywhere as well as Amazon Prime did. I bet they see a pretty slow adoption rate on this until they make it much more compelling. Or I also assume a lot of people are going to sign up for this only to be disappointed by the lack of options I mentioned in my 2nd note above. They are definitely marketing it in a misleading way.<p>Also, it's worth mentioning that Postmates has one of the worst custom support teams I've ever seen. On two separate occasions I have sent an order issues support ticket to never get a response back. Which was even more frustrating when it said they always get back to you within 24 hours after I submitted the issues. I had to eventually complain about it on Twitter before I finally got a reply from them. Quite the bummer.<p>EDIT: I do want to add a quick note to this. While I'm very critical above, I do indeed think Postmates has the best UX and app of the similar services available. Once they can just iron out some of the kinks I mentioned above, I think the potential of the service is indeed high.
Between my wife and myself, I've ordered from Postmates over a hundred times. But we barely use the service anymore because it has gotten so unreliable.<p>Even aside from the frequent "No Postmates are available", a large number of orders have issues, from excessive delays to missing items to even orders that don't show up. And while they eventually get taken care of by customer support, after waiting for two hours for dinner only to find out it's not coming, getting a refund is small consolation.<p>(I almost feel like sometime last year they switched to a model where the delivery person places the order instead of a call center. If that's true, it would help explain the drop in timeliness).<p>So while the app UX is decent the overall user experience leaves a lot to be desired.<p>I realize it's a different model, but we have way better luck with caviar.
> In order not to lose money, Postmates is limiting the free deliveries to orders over $30, which make up about 50% of the orders on Postmates.<p>New employee here (just joined this week) -- one of the things that I find so compelling about Postmates is that it's focused on building a profitable business, without having to subsidize orders.
The article mentions "merchant" over and over again and never "restaurant". Does this mean Postmates has shifted its focus away from restaurants?<p>Edit: thanks for the replies below. Restaurants are the vendors where I most often find myself wanting something very specific delivered in a timely manner and been willing to pay a small premium - Postmates serves this use case better than any other service - glad to hear you will continue to support it even as you invest in other markets as well!
I feel like Postmates will be acquired by Amazon or Google. Then again DoorDash intended to do more than food in the beginning, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them challenge Postmates soon.
I went to postmates.com and saw they supported Boston. Great! So I enter my address, and then get an error message saying they don't support my area, why don't I browse their list of current cities - which includes Boston. Is there a map somewhere of the subset of Boston they actually support?