Google Starts Making Same

Google brought its Google Express delivery service to D.C. this week, offering to bring residents goods from several big chain stores in what looks like a bid to outdo Amazon Prime. D.C. joins Boston and Chicago in getting the service this week, a move that's been predicted for a while as Google has gotten more ambitious with its real world services of late. Any order more than $15 will get to you overnight or the same day depending on how quickly you order it.

'Our idea was to make shopping your favorite local stores as easy and fast as shopping online, and to help you get what you need delivered the same day,' wrote Brian Elliott, head of partnerships for Google Shopping in a blog post. 'Since then, you've told us how we helped you restock diapers in the nick of time, made sure you had Bananagrams for family game night, and even made you feel connected to the outside world when you were home sick.'

Google Express is actually the new, shortened name of the service, previously known as Google Shopping Express that launched in San Francisco a year ago. In the D.C. area, you can get groceries from Giant Food along with anything you can find online from Costco, Barnes & Noble, L'Occitane, Guitar Center, Staple, Sports Authority, Walgreens and Toys R Us. To encourage customers to sign up, Google is offering a three-month free membership. After that, it's $95 per year subscription or a $4.99 fee per delivery, which again has to be over $15.

If all of this sounds familiar, that's because it's a pricing structure and general service that sounds an awful lot like Amazon Prime. The main difference of course being that Google is only doing the deliveries, not the rest of the process of acquiring and shipping the goods that Amazon does. Regardless, there's no question that this is Google making a claim for part of Amazon's domain. A rivalry between the two certainly fits the recent comments of Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who cited Amazon as Google's biggest rival in online searches. Competing in real world services will be a fascinating test of the two services, if only because of name association and where people go to look to buy things or get them delivered. On top of that, Google going into grocery delivery, even if that's only a part of its service, puts it at odds with plenty of startups like Instacart that are focused on exactly that, albeit with a more expansive local focus. And that's not even mentioning experiments by companies like Uber in delivering goods to people's homes. Delivery by Internet is easily one of the most competitive tech spaces and will only grow more so in the next few years, with D.C. as one of the key battlegrounds.