Amazon-Whole Foods Partnership to Offer Two-Hour Grocery Delivery

Many people strongly prefer to go to a brick-and-mortar grocery store and pick out their foods themselves. Often, they have preferences on the level of ripeness they're looking for. Others worry that anything picked out by someone else may be dented or bruised or otherwise rendered unusable. On the other hand, there are many shoppers, especially of younger, more tech-savvy generation, who would prefer the efficiency and time-saving of ordering groceries online. Well, according to a recent L.A. Times article, the Amazon-Whole Foods partnership may make that a commonplace reality for the latter demographic.

This year, Amazon is planning to add two-hour Whole Foods grocery deliveries as another benefit for Prime customers. While some Prime customers have already experienced similar benefits through Amazon Fresh, this is different in that Prime customers only have to pay $99 per year versus the $299 per year cost of Amazon Fresh. Additionally, the Whole Foods service delivers within two hours, while Amazon Fresh deliveries often have to be scheduled for the next day. However, the Whole Foods Prime option will likely have a much more limited selection than that offered on Amazon Fresh, so there is a trade-off involved.

Many potential shoppers consider Whole Food's groceries to be of high quality and therefore doubt that they will have any problems with the service, even though they aren't picking out and handling the foods themselves. Others, who have their doubts about smashed cookies or bruised fruit would prefer to shop online, then pick up in the store, thereby saving some time while still ensuring better quality. Currently, about 7% of households in the United States purchase groceries online, with most of those opting to have the groceries shipped. This new deal through Amazon Prime may drive those numbers even higher.

Amazon isn't the only company looking into the only grocery-shopping business. WalMart has developed a system whereby shoppers can order groceries ahead of time and just come into the store to pick them up. Kroger, the company that owns some grocery stores, including Ralph's and Smith's, has offered in-store pickup and is testing out delivery options. Target recently bought grocery-delivery company Shipt, and Whole Foods has even been delivering products through a company called Instacart. Amazon Prime's move is just increasing the prevalence, and will likely lead to a greater number of people ordering groceries from home.

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Big Box Retailers Looking to Compete by Combining with Same-Day Delivery Services

Over the past few years, especially during the holiday shopping season, e-commerce businesses have found themselves pulling ahead of their brick-and-mortar competitors. In this modern age, more and more shoppers value the efficiency of online purchasing over the more personalized feeling of a physical store. The economy has become based on instant gratification, and many feel that online retailers can fill that need more easily. Ronald White's L.A. Times article begs to differ: White claims that retailers are aiming to recapture the market by offering same-day delivery.

While people were once satisfied to wait up to 6 weeks for a product to arrive from a mail-order catalog, technological and business advances by companies like Amazon have led consumers to expect fast delivery, often at no extra cost. For a shipping giant like Amazon, same-day delivery isn't such a big deal, because they already built up their infrastructure over the years. For businesses like Target or Wal-Mart, things can get a little tricky. Those companies are used to delivering in bulk but tend to take several days to a week to make a delivery.

The big box chains don't have the time or the capital to build a same-day shipping platform from the ground up. So, they've turned to alternative delivery modules, most notably third-parties like Shipt, Grand Junction, and Deliv. Those services use mobile apps to connect the network of delivery drivers to the big box retailers. While some companies are on a part-time basis with those services, using them for deliveries when necessary, others are looking to make acquisitions for their future success. In fact, Target put in a $550 million acquisition offer to Shipt just last week. If the offer is accepted, Target will have their own network of same-day delivery drivers, giving the chain a competitive advantage against places like Best Buy or Wal-Mart.

These same-day delivery platforms operate under the same principle as services like Uber or Lyft. Drivers sign up to deliver packages during certain hours, deliver those packages, and get paid their set rate. If a driver gets too many negative reviews (damaged package, delayed delivery, etc) then they aren't allowed to deliver anymore. The better a deliverer's ratings, the better the perks. While services like Shipt are only economically feasible in big cities like L.A. or New York, Target s willing to make that big acquisition move because they know that the independent contractors connected through the app are faster and more reliable than mainstream delivery services like USPS or Fed-Ex.

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"Honey" Browser Extension Automatically Inputs Coupon Codes for Online Shoppers

Many consumers prefer to do their shopping online as opposed to in brick-and-mortar stores. Shopping online, especially when you know exactly what you're looking for, can be cheaper, easier, and more expedient than taking the time to go to Wal-Mart or Target and pick up the latest device. Still, consumers want to get the best deal possible, especially when shopping online. Research shows that consumers are often hesitant to place an order online due to a feeling that they may be paying too much. In his L.A. Times article, David Pierson describes an innovative browser add-on called Honey that automatically finds discount codes for many shopping websites.

The extension is free for download on all Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome browsers, and requires absolutely no effort on the part of the user. Simply by installing the add-on, the discounts will immediately begin popping up when a user goes to check out on thousands of shopping sites. The extension uses user-inputted data (like Waze) to determine which discount codes work best and which don't work at all, so each consumer using the app helps to make it better for the next user. Honey has over 5 million users, who have saved an average of $32 per month on items that they were going to purchase anyway.

This browser extension seems to be a win-win-win for everyone involved. Consumers get to find discounts that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to use on items that they were planning on purchasing anyway. The shopping sites tend to make more money because shoppers are 55% more likely to finish checking out when Honey has checked for potential discounts. Honey itself makes money because certain merchants pay to have their discounts made more visible, to increase customer traffic. Everyone is making money, without much of a risk to any one party.

About 9,000 of Honey's 21,000 affiliated merchants pays the company a commission for driving customer sales. One of their biggest issues, however, is that they have so far been unable to convince Amazon to get on board. Because Amazon has such a large share of the online shopping market, that could pose problems for Honey in the future. They hope that consumers will choose to use other websites, to keep the Seattle-based company from monopolizing the market and raising prices, but time will tell whether their efforts will be successful. Until then, Honey has an integrated feature for Amazon shoppers to let them know when prices of items in their cart have fluctuated. That feature may be enough to help Honey stay relevant in the Amazon-saturated market.

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Mobile Shopping Increasingly Becoming an Integral Component of Black Friday

Black Friday has become a cultural phenomenon throughout the US. When it first started in 1952, it was just a day to start your holiday shopping, when stores discounted their products so that they could begin making a profit for the year and be "in the black." As time went on, the deals got better and better until it got to a point that people were waiting for hours in the middle of the night on Thanksgiving to get a chance at the best discounts once the stores opened. Over the past few years, however, stores have started to offer the same deals online as in the stores, which has reduced the number of Black Friday shoppers. Samantha Masunaga, in her L.A. Times article, discusses the shift to mobile shopping and some of the reasons why Black Friday continues, even with such decreased demand.

This year, it is projected that the e-commerce for the holiday season will grow to a valuation of over $117 billion. While Cyber Monday once represented the day when deal-hunters could get discounts on their online shopping, but now that so much of the Black Friday Shopping can be done online, many people consider Cyber Monday to be obsolete. It makes more sense to get their deals over the holiday than to find an hour or two in the middle of a busy workday to find the best deals. Retailers are seeing the difference: on Thanksgiving night, which has in itself begun to replace Black Friday, sales were 13.6% higher than last year, a total of nearly $1.2 billion.

Not only are people taking advantage of online deals rather than going into the stores, a surprising number of shoppers are doing so via mobile devices instead of computers. Nearly $550 million of the $1.2 billion total on Thanksgiving night came from mobile purchases. That's a 58.6% increase from last year's mobile sales. While mobile shopping is convenient, some people find it to be too much of a hassle and prefer using a computer, at least to complete their transactions. Not enough online retailers have improved their mobile layout, which has led to a projection that while 53% of e-commerce visits will happen on mobile devices, only 34% of sales will happen on apps.

Many customers find the checkout process to be too time-consuming or confusing on mobile apps for some businesses, and opt to go onto a computer or choose an easy-to-understand platform like Amazon to make their purchases. If online retailers want to stay competitive, they will have to improve their platforms, potentially by integrating easier payment systems like PayPal, Android Pay, or Apple Pay, rather than making customers try to input credit card information on the small screen of their smartphone. Target and Wal-Mart, among other companies, have noticed improvements in their mobile performance over the past few years. After fixing its online platforms and making it easier to checkout, Target even found that mobile sales over the weekend had increased by 200% from last year.

While mobile apps and online platforms are great for the tech-savvy consumer, many customers prefer the emotional connection to Black Friday that they get by physically going to the late-night sales. Some shoppers don't want to do online shopping because they would prefer to see the product up close and examine it before buying. Other people just enjoy the cultural experience of rushing through the store, hunting for deals. Whatever the reason, even if Black Friday becomes a mainly online phenomenon, it is very likely that there will still be in-store experiences available. Black Friday is a tradition for many shoppers, and especially since many people do their bargain-hunting online, crowding is less of an issue, many shoppers expect to be able to keep up the practice for many years to come.

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