To own or not to own delivery? Grocers reassess the Instacart dilemma.

Contextual advertising will become a noticeable part of the online grocery experience, too, giving brands a chance to introduce themselves and their products, and giving online grocers another revenue stream. Instacart has been building out an advertising business, and I’d be shocked if Amazon didn’t eventually introduce advertising to its grocery ... See more

Most grocery stores have now begun to offer some form of their own in-house delivery, some of which are profitable. These profitable models generally have higher minimum order requirements, markups on items, non-flexible delivery windows (often multiple deliveries are pooled into one driver trip to save costs), and an unclear view into what product... See more

However, there’s another side to this. The pickup and delivery apps (Instacart and the like) are likely to outperform as they capture the high-margin consumer brand marketing dollars, but without the physical retail infrastructure. Building your own distribution via DTC marketing and relationships also gets more important, with Facebook and Shopify... See more