If nothing else, bad actors perpetrating ecommerce transaction fraud are clever opportunists, and a crisis like the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is proving a perfect opportunity for them to prey upon unsuspecting sellers and consumers, experts agree. The rise of contactless deliveries and working from home are among the entry points.
Grocers may be ringing up major sales from the crush of store and online panic buying due to the growing coronavirus threat, but the market will be painful after the situation abates as demand falls and supplies are overstocked, a Barclays analyst said in a research note.
Midwest grocery chain Hy-Vee is moving fulfillment of online orders from a network of four fulfillment centers back to its retail stores. The facilities, in Eagan, MN, Des Moines, IA, Omaha, NE and Kansas City, MO, will be closed later this month. The network and logistics made same-day fulfillment difficult, executives said.
Panic buying continues to cause empty grocery shelves due to the coronavirus panic, with heavier clusters in affected states as grocery retailers are starting to ration supplies. Same-day delivery providers Instacart and Postmates have expanded a “leave it at my door” option as more spooked shoppers opt for no physical contact.
Micro fulfillment centers are all the rage in e-grocery – small, highly automated systems that use robotics to fulfill online orders in 1 to 2 minutes. Neil Stern of McMillonDoolittle talks all things MFC in this latest MCM CommerceChat podcast. He’ll also lead an MFC session at Ecommerce Operations Summit (4/14-16, Orlando).
Evolv Ventures, the investment arm of CPG giant Kraft Heinz, has joined a $110 million funding round in automation and robotics firm Fabric with an undisclosed investment, keeping an eye on ways to tap into Fabric’s expertise and capabilities in ecommerce and applying it to the B2B world.
Amazon is reportedly using a micro-fulfillment center solution from Dematic at its first grocery store not named Whole Foods outside Los Angeles, sending a loud signal to the rest of the market that an MFC capability is critical to success and maintaining market share in the red-hot e-grocery sector.
Softer-than-expected holiday sales drove Walmart’s Q4 2019 earnings below expectations, but strong ecommerce and online grocery sales provided buoyancy and optimism for the year ahead. U.S. ecommerce sales grew 35%, fueled largely by grocery pickup and delivery, propelling walmart.com to its highest quarterly growth of the year.
Walmart is shutting down its Manhattan-based concierge delivery service Jetblack two years after its experimental launch, as it continued to lose money while not gaining customers or finding a buyer, the Wall Street Journal reported. Walmart had been in talks with potential buyers last year but the talks ended without bearing any fruit.
Ahold Delhaize USA said it plans to close the Midwest division of its Peapod online grocery delivery business to focus on expanding operations in the more lucrative East Coast, where most of its stores are located. Dutch-based Ahold said the Midwest operation of Peapod represented $97 million of the $1.1 billion in online sales in the U.S.