Nimber, which launched in the UK last year, makes use of the public to deliver packages as part of their planned journeys, circumnavigating delivery trucks or lorries and significantly reducing carbon emissions.

As part of this new deal, Friday-Ad customers will be quoted a price for a Nimber delivery when they buy their product, essentially allowing them to buy items from all over the country without needing to collect them.

“This is a natural partnership,” Nimber chief executive Ari Kestin told edie. “We are both community-based services and one of the challenges for Friday Ad is people being unable to buy things because they are too far away to collect and too large to be sent by mail. We can provide that solution”

The Nimber delivery function was added to certain Friday-Ad product categories on the website last week and has not yet been officially announced by either company, but the service is already working well, according to Kestin.

Nimber has a similar agreement in place with ‘the Norwegian Gumtree’ Finn.no and Kestin said his peer-to-peer service in already engaged in talks with other classified advertising websites in the UK.

Britain’s lead

Having launched in the UK last April, Nimber took just five months to match the type of volume that took two years to build in Norway, with Kestin heaping praise on the UK marketplace for its willingness to adopt sharing economy principles.

“It’s been an amazing success in the UK,” Kestin said. “It’s been adopted very well by the British public and we have close to 70,000 people in our community, with well over a hundred requests for delivery a day.

“The UK seems to be leading the way in the sharing economy model – the UK Government has looked into how to help the sector with different regulations and proposals and it’s good to see the UK take a lead.”

UberRUSH entrance?

The continued success of black cab alternative Uber has helped to clear a path for smaller sharing economy services such as Nimber. But, according to a new report released this week by UK delivery firm ParcelHero, Uber’s own on-demand delivery network ‘UberRUSH’  could actually end up becoming Nimber’s biggest rival in the UK.

ParcelHero’s head of consumer research David Jinks said: “UberRUSH has revolutionised local deliveries in a number of US cities already, forcing rivals such as Sidecar out of the market. Uber admits it is eager to develop its delivery proposition in London – with £7bn of ‘same-day courier’ revenue on the table, there’s no way Uber is going to ignore the UK market for long, which means existing local express couriers are going to have to be ready for them.”

Based on its success in the taxi market, ParcelHero projects that Uber is likely to capture at least 10% of the delivery market globally, earning it an extra $24.6bn annually.

Brad Allen

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