Postmates jumps to curbside pickup for customers, drivers

An omnichannel delivery platform is attempting to ease the post-COVID-19 brick-and-mortar reopening process. 

Postmates now offers a curbside pickup service for its retail clients. The service is meant to help retailers responsibly accelerate reopening of their stores by enabling customers and drivers to pick up orders curbside, rather than going into the physical store.

To use this feature, customers will turn on curbside pickup from their Postmates dashboard and then be prompted to check in in real time when they get to the store to notify an associate to come outside. The fleet app will also support curbside pickup, so Postmates will be able to let retail clients know that the driver are there to pick up the item.

"Restaurants and retailers across the country are ready to open their doors again and we've created curbside pickup to help them open quickly and serve customers as smoothly as possible," said Bastian Lehmann, CEO and co-founder of Postmates.

Postmates provides on-demand delivery and pickup services for more than 600,000 restaurants and retailers, many of which are exclusive partners. Postmates covers 80% of U.S. households, across all 50 states.