This week, Postmates unveiled Group Ordering, a new feature that allows individual members of the same group to choose their own items from their own devices and send them to a single shopping cart. In other words, if you’re getting group delivery among friends or ordering dinner for the family, you no longer have to corral everyone into the same room and pass around a single phone or tablet.
To use the feature, the group “host” creates an order and shares it with other group members, who choose items from their own devices. Hosts can set limits on how much group members are allowed to spend, and also set a tip amount ahead of time. Once everyone’s orders are in, the host can make any final adjustments before placing the order, which is delivered to a single location by a single Postmates driver. If the host has Postmates Unlimited, the delivery fee is waived.
Group Ordering will be rolled out over the next few days to Postmates customers. It joins existing features like Postmates Party, which launched earlier this year and allows users to piggyback off nearby orders and is another way to get that pesky delivery fee waived.
Postmates isn’t the first third-party delivery service to offer such a feature: DoorDash released a group ordering feature for its app in 2017.
What would eventually make such features even better would be the ability for group members to each pay their own tab — more or less the virtual equivalent of splitting the check. While there’s yet no indication such a feature will be added to Postmates or any other app, it’s something these companies should definitely deliver.
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