PayPay Dash

» see paypaydash.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The banner Yahoo put on the launch page carried two words in the corner that most companies spend money to avoid printing: test service. Under them, the geography. Fukuoka Prefecture only. PayPay Dash was an instant delivery trial that ran in the Tenjin district of Fukuoka and nowhere else, selling roughly 150 products out of a single Aeon Shoppers branch, delivered by a courier on a bicycle in a stated thirty minutes to an hour.

Three companies signed the press release on 12 March 2020. Yahoo! JAPAN ran the app and Aeon Kyushu supplied the store. SoftBank contributed what it had learned from an earlier last-mile delivery experiment with the same supermarket chain. The app went up for iOS and Android that same day and the service opened on the 16th. You ordered a bento or a drink and a rider collected it from the shop. Payment went through PayPay at the door.

Five months later it stopped. The closure was reported on 17 August 2020 and the service ended on the 25th, with no stated reason given anywhere I could find. A thing labeled an experiment on its first day gets to end without one. Nobody had been promised a second phase.

~ the dossier ~

~ the test area ~

Instant grocery delivery was a graveyard long before 2020. Kozmo burned through a few hundred million dollars delivering single items across American cities and Webvan built warehouses for a demand curve that did not exist. The lesson both of them taught was that the economics only work at density, and Tenjin is one of the densest commercial districts in Japan, which is presumably why it was chosen.

The timing was the strange part. PayPay Dash opened on 16 March and Japan declared a state of emergency three weeks later, so a service designed to bring food to your door should have found its moment that spring. Instead the trial was suspended under the state of emergency and did not resume until 20 May, at which point the delivery area was widened. It got three months of running in the conditions it had been built for, and then it was done.

~ the bicycle ~

What stays with me is the ratio. PayPay by 2020 was a payments brand used by tens of millions, pushed into Japanese life by one of the largest cashback campaigns anyone had attempted. The delivery arm of that brand was one supermarket in one neighborhood, served by a man on a bike with a cooler bag on his back. The photograph on the press release is exactly that, and it is a more honest picture of how big companies test things than the announcements usually allow.

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