Faced with the arrival of one American tech giant, Coles is looking for help from another.

Australia's second largest supermarket has quietly started a home delivery trial with the hi-tech taxi service Uber, as it and other retailers try to beef up their online offerings before ecommerce juggernaut Amazon opens its first local distribution centre sometime next year.



Uber is best know for its "ride-sharing" app which operates as an alternative to taxis, and more recently has launched its UberEATS service in Australia, which lets restaurants tap into a fleet of drivers for home deliveries.

Under the Coles trial, which started in early August and will run until September out of Coles' online only "dark store" in Richmond South, Coles is using Uber drivers to augment its own network of delivery vans to make same-day deliveries of items that were missing from online orders or which need to be replaced.

The two companies were giving away few details about what they hoped the trail would achieve, with a Coles spokesman stressing that it was "short and limited".