Sidecar upends its entire business model with same-day delivery service launch

Today Sidecar announced the launch of Sidecar Deliveries, an initiative that lets third-party businesses use existing Sidecar cars to deliver goods.

Sidecar says this is not a gimmick. In fact, the new service could significantly alter Sidecar’s bottom line. “Same-day delivery will represent half of our business by the end of 2015,” the company claimed in an audacious statement.

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After piloting this service in California for six months, Sidecar says it will roll the service out nationwide “in the next couple of months.”

Powered by its own API, Sidecar claims its delivery service is “80% cheaper [for businesses] than traditional services” because it’s using cars that are already on the road moving people around. On the driver side, Sidecar claims they “earned 75% more when they delivered both people and packages” during early tests with Eat24.

It’s noteworthy, however, that Sidecar Deliveries doesn’t appear to be a consumer-facing service. Instead, it’ll operate as background infrastructure between third-party companies and their customers. This may limit the service’s hype-cycle, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t threaten competing offerings from Postmates and Uber.