Dive Brief:
- Curbside has raised $25 million in venture capital to expand its buy online/pick up at the curb service to New York City and other markets.
- The app allows shoppers to order merchandise online and pick it up at a store counter or curbside with no additional fee.
- Now a year old, Curbside is already available at Target and Best Buy stores in The Bay Area, as well as a mall in its home base of San Jose, CA.
Dive Insight:
Silicon Valley startup Curbside has attracted $25 million to help it expand into new markets outside the San Francisco Bay Area. The company offers an app that allows retail customers to order online, then visit a retail store to pick up their goods from a designated counter of take delivery curbside without getting out of their cars.
Keeping customers in their cars will reduce the chance of impulse purchases in-store — a benefit of having pickup in-store. But as Curbside expands and customers are drawn to the service, retailers may have no choice but to add it to its roster of fulfillment options. If this is the case, retailers may need to revamp their website design to encourage these last-minute buys while the customer is still at home, whether it's through added marketing or well-placed product "suggestions" before checkout.
Offered at several Best Buy and Target stores in and around San Francisco already, Curbside doesn’t charge shoppers a fee for its service like delivery services, instead taking a cut of the sale. The company reports fulfilling thousands of orders per month and may expand into groceries soon — a crowded market with Instacart, Peapod, and Amazon already occupying the space.