Shipt expands into hospitality space

Shipt is now offering delivery to travel and extended-stay customers at hospitality locations across the country.

The same-day delivery and last-mile company, which was acquired by Target in 2017, is partnering with national hospitality brands InTown and Uptown Suites, Mainsail Lodging and Development, Stay Sojo, and RCI to provide a personal shopping and delivery solution. 

These partnerships will reach more than 1,000 locations in total, enabling customers and residents at partner properties to start trial Shipt memberships and browse Shipt.com through a co-branded landing page to order fresh foods, household essentials, wellness products, and other items for delivery.

Customers and residents will also be able to take their trial membership with them when they leave the partner property. Shipt worked with its hospitality partners to identify the needs of extended stay and hotel customers, one of the largest being access to delivery of food and personal essentials while in an unfamiliar area or while adjusting to a new city for an extended period.

“Shipt is here to support customers no matter where they are,” said Alex Ross, VP of business development, Shipt. “With this exciting expansion into the hospitality industry, Shipt is excited to bring personalized and high-quality delivery solutions to thousands of new customers.”

Shipt offers new features for customers, retailers

In late 2022, Shipt also made efforts to redesign its overall customer experience and provide new capabilities for retailers. Customer features included:

• Universal search: A new browsing feature allows customers to first search for the product they’re looking for, and then serves up results across all the retailers that carry that product.
• Homepage refresh: Before, when a customer opened the Shipt app, they would land on the page of the store they had previously shopped. Now, customers have visibility into all stores in their area, as well as access to inspirational shopping content. Shipt intends to show deals more prominently and make it easier for customers to have access to multiple carts they may be building.

Shipt also streamlined the pick-up process for orders leveraging Shipt Driven, its delivery-only, last-mile offering for retailers: 

• Package scanning at pick-up: Retailers can now provide more upfront details and have shoppers scan packages at pick-up, in an effort to improve accuracy across all components of an order. 
• Shopper’s name on orders: As soon as Shipt Driven order is claimed, the shopper’s name is quickly made available to the retailer for improved hand-off. 
• Delivery dimensions: Retailers can now provide Shipt with more details on an order’s size, to improve the likelihood that an order is able to fit in a shopper’s vehicle.