Urbanfetch lands in overcrowded London market
The battle to control the rapid delivery online shopping space is escalating with the arrival in London last month of US-based Urbanfetch. The company will compete with home-grown rivals, such as Qucuejumper.
Urbanfetch offers 5,000 products for delivery in central London within 60 minutes, seven days a week — its US operation already has a portfo-lio of 500,000 products.
“We are not trying to he everything to everybody, we are targeting a specific niche,” said Urbanfetch president Andrew Tsai. In New York that niche is the business community buy-ing via corporate PCs and seek-ing rapid delivery to offices or central residential areas. A similar market is targeted for London, with the product list including video rental, phar-maceuticals, books, electri-cals, food, gifts and wine.
Queuejumper managing director Thomas Fitch said lie believes that London can’t sup-port more than four fast-deliv-ery services for e-shopping. His company offers delivery within 30 minutes for Internet-placed orders.
Urbanf etch has established two warehouses in London and is using the same in-house IT applications developed for its New York operation. This links warehouses, couriers and the Web site into a seamless net-work to ensure rapid response and cost efficiency
