Starting Friday, Uber Eats will not only deliver your purchases but also handle your returns, too.
You can now use the Uber Eats app to send back eligible retail items you bought through the service. This is launching with thousands of retail locations throughout the US, including Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Pet Food Express, Pacsun and Petco, “with plans to add even more retail partners,” Uber said in a statement.
To start a return, go to your order history in the Uber Eats app and tap Return an item. Choose the product you want to send back and explain why you’re returning it. “As long as your item is eligible and fits the store’s return policy, you’re set,” Uber says. Tap Return with a courier. Once a courier picks up your item, Uber will process the refund.
You can request an Uber Eats return pickup via order history.
Uber/Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET
However, convenience comes at a price. You’ll have to pay a return fee, which is “calculated based on the courier’s time and distance.” As Uber enticingly puts it, “Think of it as a small price for never having to find parking at the mall again.” It might also be a good option if you’re not physically able to leave the house or don’t have time to do a return yourself.
If you’d rather handle a return for something purchased through Uber Eats, you can still go directly to the store to do so.
This builds upon an existing Uber Eats feature that lets you arrange for a courier to pick up prepaid and sealed packages and drop them off at the post office, UPS or FedEx.
The previous model had several issues, including an inferior app store experience.
Under new supervision (and with more experience), Amazon can do better this time.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t have “new Amazon smartphone” on my 2026 bingo card. As it turns out, according to Reuters, the retailer may be developing a new smartphone, internally known as “Transformer.”
Those familiar with the industry will instantly draw parallels to Amazon’s previous smartphone effort, the Fire Phone from 2014. Appropriately, that phone ended up as part of a fire sale about a year later.
Now, in 2026, with no fewer than five phone brands in the US — Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola, and OnePlus — Amazon faces a lot of competition. In fairness, it also has two fewer platforms to compete against. In 2014, Windows Phone and BlackBerry were still very much part of the smartphone conversation; these days, not so much.
The AppStore problem
But there’s one mistake Amazon made in its first effort that will absolutely torpedo its chances at succeeding — the Amazon AppStore and specifically the decision to forego Google Play services. Google is simply too valuable in too many lives to not support the platform. Oh, and the Amazon AppStore is terrible.
It has admittedly been a few years since I last inventoried the Amazon AppStore, but when I last checked, the Amazon AppStore was a wasteland of half-supported or unsupported apps, with two notable exceptions. Finance, home control, and communication apps were either absent or had not received updates for years prior.
The only apps in the Amazon AppStore that remained up to date were productivity apps (largely powered by Microsoft) and streaming apps. Those two categories work very well on the cheap, underpowered hardware that Amazon usually launches, and that’s fine. A coffee-table tablet is a nice thing to have lying around.
A spark of hope
Liam Tung/ZDNET
But a phone is another animal entirely. If a tablet is a device to entertain, a phone is a device for everything else. One of the key reasons Windows Phone failed was its lack of an app ecosystem. The Senior Vice President of Devices and Services, Panos Panay, is very familiar with that saga, so I’m hopeful that he will make the same arguments to the powers that be at Amazon.
Honestly, if there is anyone who I think can pull off an Amazon phone revival, it’s probably Panay, who understands design and product development better than most, and to be perfectly honest, he’s my absolute favorite product presenter.
Of course, all of this is early days. This phone is being worked on internally, and even Reuters reports that it could get the axe long before it sees the light of day. Personally, I’m intrigued by the idea, but I sincerely hope that Amazon doesn’t make this the shopping phone it tried to build in 2014.
If Amazon just wants to make a nice, well-built smartphone, with a skin that pushes Amazon content to the fore, I’m fine with that. But leaving Google behind is a mistake that Amazon cannot afford to make again. Fool me once, and all that.
So, if this phone is to have a chance at success, it needs to embrace Google services so it can be a phone that everyone can use. Amazon has the brand power to make a phone like this work, even up against juggernauts like Apple and Samsung, but it needs to approach this correctly, lest it end up in yet another Fire phone fire sale.
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