In Germany, you can order your iPhone with your McDonalds
Particularly in hindsight of the events of the last few years, ordering your groceries online has gradually become more and more popular across the United States and Europe. In many places, this has been people's safest way to get their food and necessities without risking theirs and others' health.
Even before the pandemic, ordering your groceries, just like fast food, has always been a thing, especially for people who have difficulty getting around. And even now, as things have been slowly getting better around the world, the concept of ordering from your local Walmart or Whole Foods just like from McDonalds, has remained a much more popular concept than it used to be.
Many large store chains like those mentioned above have established their own private delivery service over the past years, but hundreds of delivery service startups have also been cropping up across the globe, to fill in the gaps for having all kinds of goods delivered right to your doorstep.
One thing that has never really been a commonly delivered item, however, is high-end tech—smartphones and the like. The swarming startups have been starting to fill in this gap as well, however, and one particular new German company has recently been collecting massive funding to dedicate its services to delivering high-end products exclusively.
The budding company (also reported on by TechCrunch) is called Arive—its similarity to the word "arrive" is no coincidence. The company's slogan is "Let everything you love arive: Live in Munich and soon elsewhere."
The types of premium products Arive offers to deliver aren't limited to tech, either. Almost nothing is off the list: you can order cosmetics, home hardware, and fashion and personal care items through them as well.
All items can be ordered directly through the Arive app, and customers are being promised delivery (by bike, no less) within 30 minutes flat. As quick as ordering a pizza from your local Papa John's—although we highly doubt that the same "If your order arrives late, you get it for free" rule will apply in this case.
While many premium smartphone companies also offer free delivery, for comparison, Apple's quoted delivery time is two days for shipping. Samsung, on the other hand, quotes 1 to 7 business days for items ordered online. Smaller startups such as Arive could change the way people shop for premium tech for good, once they grow more prevalent across the world.
As a newly sprouted startup, Arive has already managed to secure 6 million euros in seed funding, which equates to over 7,100 million US dollars. This has already allowed it to go live in Munich, but is already well on its way to launching its delivery services to Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg.
And if they meet with enough success, who knows, they might even go international—perhaps sparking with them a wave of competition in that domain.
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