Ocado wages a grocery war against Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba

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No one has fully mastered the art of selling groceries online.
The firm he co-founded, Ocado, has shaken up the British online retail market, and it is trying to do the same internationally.
By selling expertise from almost 20 years as a pioneering online grocer to supermarkets in America and elsewhere, he wants to help them become a fourth force in the industry—able to resist the big three.
But his insurgency shows how the battle to dominate online groceries remains wide open.
Yet customers continue to return for more, despite having ever more options to order online and have groceries delivered to their doorstep.
In China and America, online grocery shopping is a miserly 3.8% and 1.6% of the total, respectively.
Partly thanks to Ocado, Britain trails only South Korea and Japan in its embrace of online grocers.
Earlier this year Mr Steiner persuaded Marks & Spencer, a British retailer, to pay £750m for a half of Ocado’s domestic online-grocery business.
The American supermarket chain aims to order 20 Ocado customer fulfilment centres ( CFC s, or, as Kroger calls them, sheds) by 2021, far more than the four that Ocado has so far erected in Britain (the newest burned down this year).
Despite their recent slide Ocado’s shares still trade like a software firm’s, not a supermarket’s.
Ocado aims to make up for the long drives to deliver groceries by speeding up its robots, packing crates of 50 items in six to seven minutes.
There will be no time-pressed “pickers” elbowing shoppers aside to fill an online order, as in other supermarkets.
Last month it launched free delivery of Amazon Fresh, a grocery service, to its Prime members.
Amazon’s domestic rivals are making existing supermarkets the kernel of their online operations, either for picking up orders or delivering them.
The model is Walmart, which cited sharp growth in online grocery from its supercentres in America as a reason for higher sales this summer

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