Google purchases parcel delivery service BufferBox

Service could be a direct competitor to Amazon Locker

Google has made its second purchase of the week, buying up parcel delivery service BufferBox, it was announced on Friday.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, though it has been reported that Google paid $17 million to acquire the company.

BufferBox works similarly to Amazon Locker, in that it allows people to ship packages to a network of self-serve parcel pick-up stations. Recipients are e-mailed a pin code that they have to enter to receive the package.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company announced the acquisition in a blogpost Friday:

“We have been able to achieve more than we could have ever imagined since we started working on our idea a couple years ago, and the team couldn’t be more excited about the future. As online shopping becomes a bigger part of how you buy products, we look forward to playing a part in bringing that experience to the next level. We are happy to share that it will be business as usual for our users and we are looking forward to continuing to build out the service,” founders Aditya Bali, Jay Shah and Mike McCauley wrote.

”It has been an incredible journey and we’d like to thank everyone who has played such an important part in enabling us to make it this far. We couldn’t be happier to be able to continue building out our vision within Google.”

According to an article from The Financial Post, which the guys at BufferBox linked to in their announcement, the entire BufferBox team will be moving into the local Google offices, which are, coincidentally, right upstairs from the company’s current offices.

BufferBox, which graduated from Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator accelerator program this past summer, currently offers its services for free, in order to build up a user base. The company has plans to start charging a fee of $3 or $4 per package to have them delivered to its boxes.

Google was not available for comment, but it did give the following statement to various media outlets:

“We want to remove as much friction as possible from the shopping experience, while helping consumers save time and money, and we think the BufferBox team has a lot of great ideas around how to do that.”

Google’s 2012 acquisitions

Google bought social network Milk in March, online payment company TxVia in April, along with mobile app Sparrow and social media marketing company Wildfire in July.

Google also purchased Meebo in June for a reported $100 million, and then purchased mobile productivity app maker Quickoffice the next day.

In August, Google acquired the Frommer’s travel brand for $23 million and, in September, it purchased malware scanner VirusTotal for an undisclosed amount.

In October, Google bought up Ukrainian-based face-recognition company Viewdle and, this past week, it was announced that it had bought coupon-targeting company Incentive Targeting, which will allow it to offer targeted deals to users, perhaps on Google Wallet.

(Image source: https://www.crunchbase.com)

Watch the video below to see how BufferBox works: