Dive Brief:

• E-commerce platform Bigcommerce and Uber’s UberRUSH delivery service have partnered to launch same-day delivery for local retailers in Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco, the companies announced Wednesday.

• Beginning next year, shoppers can select UberRUSH as a delivery option upon checkout on a participating retailer’s site.

• The partnership comes as UberRUSH solidified its operations in the three cities, where customers can use the app-based service to get deliveries. The service until now has been in a pilot phase in New York.

Dive Insight:

This partnership between Bigcommerce and UberRUSH fuels the current frenzy in last-mile delivery and could be a great boon to smaller merchants who’d like a way to compete with the likes of Target, Macy’s, and other retailers that are boosting their omnichannel fulfillment options, like same-day delivery and in-store pickup of online orders.

“UberRUSH has allowed us to expand our business without the cost and infrastructure needs we would traditionally need,” Shom Chowdhury, CEO of Indie Fresh, a purveyor of healthy smoothies and soups on New York, said in a statement. “We’re able to offer delivery to new neighborhoods and serve all of Manhattan from a single brick-and-mortar location without compromising the quality of our product.”

The space is yet to sort itself out, though, as food—restaurant and grocery delivery—appear to dominate the same-day delivery rush, despite recent moves by Kohl’s and Macy’s (which both partner with delivery startup Deliv) to offer the option.

Companies like Uber, Deliv, and Postmates must yet contend with challenges to their model, like regulators’ concerns about whether drivers are truly independent contractors or are in practice essentially operating like employees. And while the services remain fairly inexpensive to the consumer, the companies in the space appear to be operating with investor funding. It’s not clear that the enterprises are truly profitable, or would be if they were obligated to offer drivers benefits like Social Security pay. 

Delivery startup Shyp, for example, has gotten ahead of such uncertainty by offering its drivers employment in order to better maintain control of its operations and growth.