Ebay buys same-day courier service Ebay is acquiring a same-day courier service based in London and overhauling its own website as it seeks to compete against Amazon and Walmart and give itself a social media edge. The Californian ecommerce group is buying Shutl, a four-year-old start-up with operations in the US and the UK, in order to take more control of product deliveries. There's no doubt consumer expectations [regarding shipping] are going up. What might have been acceptable five years ago is not acceptable today," said Devin Wenig, eBay president. In other announcements that foreshadow intense competition in the end-of-year shopping season, eBay launched social media features that let shoppers follow "curated" product collections, mimicking start-ups such as Pinterest. It also announced partnerships with Toys R Us and Best Buy that will let shoppers buy their products on eBay and pick them up in stores, the same "click-and-collect" service that was used by 40 per cent of UK shoppers last Christmas, eBay said. The service is developing more slowly in the US, but Walmart, the world's biggest retailer by sales, is trying to put it at the heart of its nascent ecommerce business. Mr Wenig and Shutl's founder and chief executive, Tom Allason, both declined to comment on how much eBay paid for the business. The eBay president said the Shutl acquisition would enable eBay shoppers to get products delivered in as little as an hour in 25 US cities by the end of 2014. Shutl does not own delivery trucks or employ drivers. Instead its business is built around an algorithm that performs the role of a middleman, matching product orders with local couriers based on factors including cost, location and capacity. What might have been acceptable five years ago is not acceptable today Devin Wenig, eBay president You've got courier networks in almost every city and most of them have excess capacity. What the Shutl platform allows us to do is link our package volume to that excess capacity," Mr Wenig said. Many US retailers - both online and offline - were shaken last year when they realised Amazon was building more warehouses across the US in order to offer same-day delivery to more customers. On its website, eBay said that a team of expert curators would hand-pick items for product collections in order to give shoppers ideas about what to buy from the 500m-plus items that it sells. "This is the world beyond search," Mr Wenig said. That's important but it implies somebody that knows what they want . . . That's not the entirety of the way people shop. They also shop through inspiration, browsing and all of those other things.