The Internet and Delivery Services
Posted by harrisj Wed, 06 Apr 2005 17:56:00 GMT
This New York Times Article Online Shopping Makes New York a Cardboard Jungle has an interesting quote on why FreshDirect has succeeded in delivering online groceries in New York (where I live and am a customer), while so many other delivery services have failed (even in New York)"New York is an ideal environment for online grocery shopping," said Patti Freeman Evans, a retail analyst for Jupiter Media, an Internet consulting firm. "A time-starved population that is geographically concentrated and Internet-saturated: that's just what you want."This seems to nail the real reason why many online stores failed during the dot-com boom. If you can make shopping at your site cheaper, easier, and faster than shopping in a brick-and-mortar place (that was still a big if for a lot of places), you still could fail. I imagine a lot of seemingly good business on paper died due to high delivery costs (for nationwide grocery-delivery services; FreshDirect ramped up neighborhood by neighborhood) or because they assumed that too much of their target audience actually wanted to shop for their service on the Internet (or even knew what it was) in the first place.
