Uber wants to start delivering meals to your doorstep. The ride-hailing service is planning to expand its nascent UberEats program via a standalone app that will let customers make delivery orders from restaurants in 10 cities, including New York, San Francisco and Chicago. Right now UberEats is a lunchtime-only offering in select cities buried within the regular Uber app, but the new version will let customers make orders throughout the day, the Wall Street Journal reports. The app is already being tested in Toronto.
UberEats will tap into Uber’s vast network of drivers in order to complete deliveries. When a customer makes an order from a participating restaurant, Uber will locate drivers who are near the restaurant at the time and see if they want to complete the order and collect a delivery fee. Drivers will be able to take multiple orders from the same restaurant to increase efficiency.
The delivery fee is expected to be about $5, which is considerably more than restaurants on food-ordering apps like Seamless tend to charge. The benefit of UberEats and similar apps like Postmates,though, is that they let customers order delivery from restaurants that don’t offer delivery service internally.
The new app is expected to launch by the end of March.
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