EBay sees an opening to take on Amazon with a new service announced Wednesday called Managed Delivery that the San Jose-based company said will ship products sold over eBay’s marketplace.
Managed Delivery is set to launch next year with partnerships with third-party shipping centers in several regions of the United States, eBay said. The company will manage the overall service while those third-party partners run the operations.
The new service will allow sellers to provide free shipping to buyers, according to eBay. So far, the company has not identified its shipping partners.
“A common request we hear from our high-velocity sellers is to help make delivery of high-volume items easy and fast,” eBay CEO Devin Wenig said in a statement. “Managed Delivery will be a competitively priced logistics solution for businesses selling high-volume goods in popular categories like electronics, home and garden and fashion.”
In an interview with Business Insider, Wenig said the service doesn’t intend to compete with Amazon on instant shipping of commodities: “We’re not trying to get you paper towels in an hour,” Wenig said. “If you’re trying to get every package to everybody in an hour, maybe you need to run a million warehouses. That’s not what we’re trying to do.”
Instead, the service will target higher-value products such as electronics and clothing. Forty to 50 percent of items bought over eBay could be delivered with the new service.
And the service will help boost eBay’s branding image, the CEO said.
Whereas Amazon-branded packages are ubiquitous, most eBay packages don’t currently feature the website’s branding — although eBay sellers mail 1.5 million packages per day, Wenig said 99 percent of them don’t show the company’s logo.
“If every eBay package showed up in an eBay box there would be millions every day on people’s doorsteps,” Wenig told Business Insider.
