Postmates launches its one-hour delivery service on the web

Delivery startup Postmates made major moves on the web today with the launch of online ordering.

VentureBeat first revealed Postmates’ plans back in December; the feature, we’re told, had been on the table for quite some time, but was only seriously prioritized last month. Starting today, Postmates’ customers can order anything the service usually offers: food, flowers, stationery, you name it — just as long as it can make it up a five-floor walkup.

In the future, Postmates wants to give merchants the ability to customize their Postmates stores. Product head Sara Mauskopf tells us, “Over time we’d like them to perhaps even be able to embed a widget on their website.” Postmates wants to deepen its connections with merchants and eventually get them to subsidize delivery — in exchange for Postmates’ driving consumer demand.

According to Mauskopf, “I think it will eventually be much cheaper for everyone to use our fleet than to try to maintain their own fleet … We’re in very, very early stages, because we just started bringing on merchants — we do have a merchant platform, but we are in the very early stages of that.”

Ultimately, “the goal is essentially to get the price down for the customer,” Mauskopf tells us.