Startups, retailers, and grocery giants alike, everyone is taking a stab at entering the realm of delivery to bring their products to the consumer rather than enticing the customers into the store. Product delivery as a market, specifically groceries, has grown immensely over the last few years. Amazon, Google, Instacart, Postmates, Shipt, Relay Foods, Peapod,…
In an effort to sell more books, Amazon, the king of online retail, has opened its first brick-and-mortar store in its hometown of Seattle. Located in a mall near the University of Washington, the outlet has been dubbed Amazon Books. Amazon getting physical is a curious move, will it pay off or will it be…
A look back at the evolution of logistics is an interesting one. Defined as “the management of materials flow through an organization, from raw materials through to finished goods”, logistics had been relatively unchanged for hundreds of years. Civilizations moved boxes, put products on ships, cars, trucks, trains and planes, and traveled all over the…
The below is an excerpt from ES3’s “collaborate.grow.win. how smart devices create smart supply networks” whitepaper. Receive your copy today to understand the impacts of the convergence of the Internet of Things and the Physical Internet on retail’s future state. The Physical Internet provides a global framework for collaboration, enabling scale and cost-savings. Designed to…
PwC’s Annual Global Total Retail Consumer Survey is in, and the results are quite interesting. Grocery topped the charts as the category with the highest sales on mobile (tablet and smartphone), beating out apparel and electronics by a large margin. These results coincide with the explosion in grocery e-commerce this year, with startups like Instacart grabbing…
In a lighthearted video, Whole Foods and Instacart extol the benefits of their new partnership. Want hard to find products or want to send groceries to your favorite college student? The service has you covered with rapid delivery. As detailed in our previous post, Whole Foods now offers online ordering and delivery via Instacart in…
When eCommerce first gained a lot of volume, retailers built dedicated warehouses to ship orders. This process resulted in the creation of two inventory pools, one for online, and one for in-store. Often these two inventory pools are separated by a firewall, and cannot communicate. This makes for a frustrating experience as a shopper; how…
We’ve been talking about the importance of convenience for a while, but Waitrose, a British retailer, has elevated that thought to the next level by employing a Director of Convenience, who promptly introduced a new store format to cater to “transumers.” What are transumers? Chances are you are one. “Transumers” refers to traveling consumers, people…
