Uber says it will test two new delivery initiatives during the pandemic: Direct, aimed at retailers and businesses, and Connect, aimed at personal items
Drivers to transport items ranging from medical supplies to pet food — Uber is reviving an attempt to offer deliveries of goods …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Uber's third run at goods delivery, and the corpus makes the pattern explicit: a 2015 same-day delivery program in talks with over 400 merchants was followed by UberRush's launch in Chicago and San Francisco that October — both of which the company later abandoned. What is different now is the trigger: ride-hailing demand has slumped hard enough that two weeks earlier Uber began listing delivery and grocery jobs inside its own app for idle US drivers (the job-listings move).
Direct targets retailers and businesses while Connect handles personal items like medical supplies and pet food, reusing an existing driver network rather than building new inventory infrastructure as the 2015 attempts did. The follow-through matters: by December Uber had expanded Connect to more than 2,400 additional US cities and towns, and five years on it launched Uber Direct in India through ONDC integration, serving grocery deliveries for Zepto and KPN Farm Fresh.
First-order effects
- Uber's US drivers get a substitute income stream during the ride-hailing slump, consistent with the app's earlier shift toward listing delivery and grocery work.
- Retailers and small businesses gain a same-day local delivery option without contracting a dedicated courier, since Direct rides on Uber's existing driver fleet.
Second-order effects
- Local couriers and parcel carriers face price competition from a network whose drivers are already on the road, pressuring per-delivery rates in dense urban markets.
- If the tests convert, Uber's driver base becomes dual-purpose — people and packages — changing how the company prices and allocates supply between its ride-hailing and delivery products.
Third-order effects
- The December expansion of Connect to 2,400+ cities and the 2025 launch of Direct in India with ONDC integration suggest the pandemic test hardened into a standing B2B logistics business layered on top of mobility, not a temporary crisis measure.
- A persistent package layer on ride-hailing networks points toward urban last-mile delivery consolidating around companies that own both the driver supply and the demand funnel, squeezing standalone courier intermediaries.
The trend: Ride-hailing networks are converting their driver fleets into dual-use mobility-and-logistics platforms, with crisis-driven experiments like Direct and Connect becoming permanent B2B delivery businesses.