Amazon Expands Grocery Delivery Service

By George Anderson

Amazon.com is expanding its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery business to the entire Seattle area over the next three months. 

The company, which began testing home delivery of groceries to a small number of zip codes in the area in 2007, requires a minimum $30 purchase and charges a $5 fee for orders under $75.

Doug Herrington, vice president of consumables for Amazon, told Bloomberg, "We have a lot of confidence in the long-term economics. For a significant portion of the population, they’re going to find that the convenience, selection and pricing of online grocery shopping is going to be really compelling."

Discussion Questions: What advantages or disadvantages does Amazon have moving into the home delivery grocery business? Is there anything specific you can point to that makes you think Amazon has figured out how to succeed where others have failed?

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Paula Rosenblum
Paula Rosenblum
14 years ago

There’s too much missing from this story for me to draw a lot of conclusions. We know what the selling channel is, but we don’t know the fulfillment site, the number of trucks, delivery radius, etc. etc. etc.

Grocery delivery is one of those things that everyone wants, but no one has really figured out how to make money on. It’s all about delivery costs.

Grocery delivery is even harder than furniture delivery…it’s costly until you reach some kind of critical mass around delivery density.

Obviously this is just a first step, executed close to home so that it can be closely monitored. As a consumer I’d love to have a lot of fresh and even non-perishable items delivered to me…but as a retailer, it’s hard to see where the money is.

Doug Stephens
Doug Stephens
14 years ago

I think Amazon is banking on two things:

1. An aging population that is comfortable online, and for whom grocery shopping will become increasingly laborious.

2. Growth in the number of people who are working from home offices and therefore not conveniently passing by a local grocery store on the way home from work.

If these are some of their base assumptions, I think they’re correct. I don’t think however, that this will be an overnight success. It’s a proposition that will mature with the population.

David Dorf
David Dorf
14 years ago

I don’t see any advantage for Amazon over a traditional grocery chain, so I can’t figure out why they’d want to be in that business. Instead, they should focus on non-perishables like Alice does. That business model seems better aligned with Amazon’s existing distribution.

Ben Sprecher
Ben Sprecher
14 years ago

Paula is right–the economics of grocery delivery ultimately comes down to customer density and delivery costs (i.e., the “Last Mile” problem). This is a nut that any serious player–Amazon included–must crack to make a viable business.

Of course, unlike the WebVans of the world, Amazon can simply copy or extend its existing infrastructure for many parts of the business. It has already figured out how to do warehouse logistics, web shopping interface design, scalable systems architecture, supply-chain management, and a host of other pieces of the puzzle. The only dragons left to slay are perishables management and delivery logistics.

Another key advantage Amazon brings is that they are masters of the cross-sell, up-sell, and individually-targeted marketing. The “people who bought X also bought Y…” notices that Amazon provides translate into real dollars for them, and their collaborative filtering algorithms (in non geek-speak: the way they predict what might appeal to one shopper from the past behavior of other shoppers) are considered–along with Netflix’s–to be the best in the world. Given that they carry the largest inventory of products across a bazillion categories of any retailer on earth, the opportunities for adding items to your cart are nearly infinite. And as anyone knows who has thrown one more book into their cart to get over the Super Saver Shipping threshold, the $75 free-delivery threshold can encourage a lot of impulse buys.

The final major advantage they bring is money. Amazon can afford to experiment with the model in Seattle and lose money doing it for as long as they need to get things right. And because of its scale and national name recognition, once is does have a model that works, it can replicate it nationwide and quickly build critical mass in each new market.

Marge Laney
Marge Laney
14 years ago

No, actually, I think they have less of a chance of making a go of it than does a local grocer, due to their size. The idea of trying to straighten out a mistake with my perishable groceries with a customer service rep in some call center doesn’t excite me. Customer service from India anyone?

As far as online grocery in general is concerned, there was a discussion about this awhile back and I think the general consensus was that the center of the store lends itself to online shopping where produce and meat do not. People still want to have a good look at produce and meat before they buy. There are also huge fulfillment issues around cost and delivery; can the average person stay at home waiting possibly for hours for their turn for delivery? Sounds like it could turn into a weekly round of waiting for the repairman; not a pleasant thought.

Matt Hahn
Matt Hahn
14 years ago

Grocery delivery on a scale like Amazon’s is a tough nut to crack. Though the company has a great distribution model, groceries are very different from books and Kindles. I would be interested to see how this test has impacted sales of certain items. Grocery shopping can be very impulsive and encompasses a large variety of items; Bakery, Deli, etc, and ordering online changes the consumer mentality. They may actually spend less on groceries than before because they’re not adding random items while walking down the aisle or at checkout. The average family probably spends more than $75 at a time (or will wait until they need to before ordering online) so does that mean free delivery for most consumers?

I would certainly like to understand the model more to see how it can be profitable for Amazon. Maybe getting people to think of Amazon as their one-stop shopping for all products is reason enough?

Eliott Olson
Eliott Olson
14 years ago

The future is always hard to predict because of unintended consequences. Cap & Trade might drive up the cost of energy so much that the refrigerated and frozen sections of a supermarket become uneconomical and favor distribution from a central warehouse. On the other hand, the cost of petrol will also skyrocket, so it won’t be economical to operate all of those delivery trucks.

Perhaps with rising energy costs to prevent global warming and the high inflation that is sure to come with our massive debt the Government should subsidize the supermarkets so that they can at least distribute rice, beans, oil and a few greens to us. I am getting indigestion thinking about the future. I am going to my doctor while I still have one.

Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson
14 years ago

The Halo from Fresh quality food will propel Amazon to the next level! The level is “Top Of Mind” daily! That works? Watch that next steps will be Grocerant food, ready-to-eat, better-for-you meals delivered by Amazon!

Herb Sorensen, Ph.D.
Herb Sorensen, Ph.D.
14 years ago

First, it is important to clearly distinguish the three components of a retail sale: the mental part–the meeting of the minds; the physical delivery; the transfer of money. Surely no one thinks Amazon might be inadequate on handling the money, so the commentariat always focuses on the physical delivery. There is more behind that than the local neighborhood “warehouse/store” competing with home delivery.

The piece that is missing from all this is the SELLING part, and I’m not referring to the order-taking role of the typical retailer running a self-service bricks-and-mortar establishment. Self-service retailers typically don’t know diddly squat about personal selling to shoppers, and Amazon is far advanced in this area.

Actual SELLING is the heart of Amazon’s business, while order taking and physical delivery is the heart of the off-line retailers business. The “salesman” is going to win, given time and deficiency in this department for the offline retailer.

These comments simply lay the ground work for what I refer to as the Amazonification of retail. It’s seriously doubtful that mercantilist retailers will change their own minds and cultures fast enough to get at the forefront of this movement. The movement may ultimately be managed by brands who create and maintain helpful links to shoppers, whether they are in the bricks and mortar store, or at home or elsewhere online. Pay attention!!! Shoppers WILL BE ONLINE IN THE BRICKS-AND-MORTAR STORE, via their phones/PDAs, etc.–and the offline retailer will have NO control of this process.

Anne Bieler
Anne Bieler
14 years ago

Amazon understands online retailing–which has to be the foundation for making money in this business. There are huge challenges in sourcing fresh products, understanding what quality level is “right” for the online shopper, local infrastructure for timely delivery and more–but likely Amazon will build a model that can work for their target shoppers. The industry is watching!

Gene Detroyer
Gene Detroyer
14 years ago

I am a huge proponent of Grocery Delivery Service. One of the keys to success is that the mindset of the retailer has to move away from the store. The success of Grocery Delivery is the ability of the retailer to move the product from the depot to the customer.

Amazon has everything in place to make this successful, other than their ability to move the product from their depots to their customers. This problem isn’t solved by UPS, FedEx or USPS. The type of trucking and manpower that is needed to go local is not part of their business structure.

However, Amazon has always seemed to know what they were doing. They would have great advantage over other grocery retailers on the customer interface side of the business. What they need is an efficient back end. It would not surprise me if Amazon were to establish relationships with small wholesalers who handle the depot-to-customer part of the sale.

Craig Sundstrom
Craig Sundstrom
14 years ago

Doug Herrington, vice president of consumables for Amazon, told Bloomberg, “We have a lot of confidence in the long-term economics… online grocery shopping is going to be really compelling.”

Sorry Doug, I just can’t agree with you; it’s nothing (personal) against Amazon–they’ve certainly succeeded at what they set out to do (even if no one’s quite sure it’s profitable for them)–but I just can’t see the online grocery business ever amounting to much more than a niche category…bigger, perhaps, than “mail order shoe shining,” but smaller than convenience stores by some distance.

Rick Boretsky
Rick Boretsky
14 years ago

I think online grocery shopping has great potential, but I am not sure how Amazon will execute on this. I agree with others that it takes great service, care, and efficient process to make it a money-making operation. I think that is best suited to local grocers that can provide that level of service in densely populated areas. Tesco has been wildly successful with its online shopping division in the UK and I recently interviewed and wrote about Toronto grocer Longo’s, who has also been very successful with their growing online business. It can even work with meat and vegetables, if the grocer truly cares and shops as if they are picking the produce for themselves.