When eBay purchased Jack Abraham’s Milo.com in December 2010, it caused some head scratching. While retail Inventory is helpful to track goods availability and has some value in developing location-based promotions, it seemed an unlikely anchor for eBay’s SMB and local ecommerce services.

Abraham’s upgrade of his title to head of EBay Local last year, however, indicated that changes were afoot. And this week, eBay has finally unveiled the fruit of his labors: eBay Now, a same day delivery service that builds on inventory to take it to the next logical step.

The service, following in the footsteps of first generation local services such as Kozmo.com and UrbanFetch, has launched in San Francisco with BestBuy, Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, Target, ToysRUs and Walgreen. It is mostly aimed at luring major merchant accounts to eBay’s broad range of merchant services.

Deliveries are $5 and available for orders over $25 from 9-9 during the week, and from 9-6 on Sunday. Three free deliveries per customer are available during the test. Other Milo customers that might jumpo in include Home Depot, Ikea, Lowe’s, Sears and J.C. Penney.

Strategically, eBayNow positions eBay against other ecommerce heavyweights seeking to provide a suite of etail services, from promotions to search to transactions to hosting…specifically Amazon (although Amazon indicated this week that it will not be providing a similar service.) Long-term, Google and others that are developing transaction marketing services could also compete. Uber, the Web-based limo reservations service, is also experimenting with delivery, although it isn’t clear whether the limited delivery services that have been introduced are merely meant to promote the limo service while cars sit empty.

Tags: eBay, Jack Abraham, Milo.com

No Comment