Liz Young of The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon.com is testing new store formats that more seamlessly align its online fulfillment and in-person shopping. Young writes:
Amazon.com is testing new grocery formats that blend its broad assortment of online goods with in-person shopping, as the nation’s largest e-commerce retailer strains to expand its role in a market dominated by grocery giants with sprawling store networks.
Amazon’s new designs aim to pull together various fulfillment networks for its Whole Foods Market premium grocery business and its mass-market Amazon Fresh stores into a common delivery platform, giving the grocery businesses greater scale with online customers as rivals including Walmart, Target and Kroger invest more in using their larger numbers of stores as distribution hubs.
The company’s goal is to create one-stop shopping for products ranging from organic produce to Tide detergent and Cheez-It crackers and eliminate the need for shoppers to visit multiple stores. […]
More American consumers began purchasing groceries online for pickup or home delivery during the pandemic. Online sales made up 10.3% of all grocery sales in the U.S. last year, up from 5.3% in 2019 before the pandemic, according to consulting firm Bain & Co.
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