[hatsunearu]

It really is. There is nothing more to say than the fact that small business owners can't afford to have a dedicated delivery service when they know demand is near 0 in some hours and through the roof in another.

I'm curious though--will small business owners bother to implement this in their website, or isn't it easier for someone else (Uber, or its competitor) to do it for them?

[dieselz]

if you check out the bottom of the article, Uber has developed a dashboard for SMBs. But it's smart that they've opened this up to enable startups to leverage this as well as enterprise customers.

[chrismessina]

Indeed, UberRUSH exists for business end users that want to deliver their goods and products easily, especially if they don't have an app: https://rush.uber.com

The UberRUSH API exists for developers that want to go above and beyond and integrate Uber deeply into their products, services, or experiences.

A great example of this is Pythagoras (https://www.getpi.co/), a re-imagining of pizza delivery. Pythagoras doesn't have a brick and mortar storefront, and care a lot about design — so they built their own iOS app and use UberRUSH for delivery. Prior to integrating with UberRUSH, they needed to build and maintain their own fleet of delivery couriers, which limited their reach to a few neighborhoods in San Francisco. After integrating with UberRUSH, they now deliver across the city, expanding their addressable market size overnight without any additional overhead (aside from integrating the UberRUSH API into their app).

In this sense, we're offering the utility of UberRUSH to more contexts and use cases.