Postmates launching pickup feature

Postmates, the startup that offers on-demand delivery for anything in your city, now lets people order ahead for pickup. This comes about one year after Square’s Caviar expanded into pickups, following the acquisition of OrderAhead’s pickup business.

Postmates started testing Pickup in San Francisco earlier this week, and plans to officially launch it in the next couple of weeks, a Postmates spokesperson told TechCrunch. Currently, there are over 200 merchants participating in Pickup, including my personal favorite, Papalote.

“The idea around pickup is around expanding the retail experience to our merchants,” the spokesperson said. “It’s giving those merchants another tool to expand the reach.”

After the official launch in San Francisco, Postmates plans to expand Pickup to New York and Los Angeles within the next couple of months.

This update comes after Postmates in November shipped a revamped version of its app, which added a grocery service and scheduled deliveries to the platform.

Postmates’ pickup functionality comes on the heels of news it may be teaming up with DoorDash in an effort to better compete against Uber, GrubHub and Amazon, Recode reported earlier today. Postmates declined to comment on the rumor to TechCrunch.

To date, Postmates is doing three million deliveries a month with a gross merchandise volume of $1.2 billion.