The Amazonification of Uber: Part II

CodeCanyon · May 14

Three years ago, I wrote about the Amazonification of Uber, an evolution of the transportation company into a closed business loop that feeds customers back into other Uber channels. At the time, the focus was on how Uber creates customer stickiness by, for example, actively cross-selling food delivery customers into grocery, and grocery into alcohol, and then alcohol back into mobility.

Today, Uber appears to be moving beyond its focus on transportation and working to become a convenient super app, an aggregator of services, a daily-use lifestyle platform with its best offerings tucked behind a paywall.

Case in point: Uber this week is launching its first Uber One Member Days, the company’s own version of Amazon’s Prime Day. Prime Day is a two-day shopping event exclusively for Amazon Prime members, a consumerist hype fest that leads people to spend more than they normally would on material objects because THE DEALS!

Amazon has seen sales rise every year since launching the event in 2015, and last year, the company is estimated to have topped $14 billion in sales.

Uber is a long, long way away from achieving such scale, but the potential is there given the company’s global presence, logistics technology, and network of drivers – both gig and autonomous.

The first Uber One Member Day goes from May 16 to 23 and promises tens of thousands of deals across Uber’s own product lineup as well as its various retail and hospitality partners.

Uber customers will have access to 20% off Uber Black, 30% off Uber Reserve, and 40% off Uber Comfort. Other deals include:

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3,000 Delta Skymiles points for people who’ve linked their Delta and Uber accounts and taken 10 trips during the week.
Oura rings discounts.
$20 off your next Ticketmaster purchase if you spend $3 on groceries.
Free food from almost every fast food restaurant, including a Chipotle burrito, a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee, and a 10 piece chicken nuggets from McDonald’s.

“We want to create delight for Uber One members,” Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer, told TechCrunch. “This should be a great savings period for them. But also for folks who are not members right now, it’s a great way for them to get an introduction into membership as they become members during this period.”

Uber is always working to grow its Uber One membership base, which is at around 30 million members today. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call last week that members “tend to have high retention.”

“They spend three times more than non-members, as well,” Khosrowshahi said.

As Uber works to aggregate more partnerships outside of food and grocery delivery (just look at its recent tie-up with Home Depot) and combine those deals with its membership program, the company is mirroring Amazon’s evolution. Amazon started as a digital bookseller. Then it began selling everything. Now it also owns the infrastructure for both e-commerce and digital life, whether that’s AWS cloud services or Prime Video.

For many, Amazon is a way of life. With Uber One Member Days, the company is signaling that it, too, wants that kind of ubiquity. And it’s betting that asset-light mobility – not packages delivered in Rivian vans – could be the next backbone of digital consumer culture.