Amazon.com Inc.’s $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods is paying off in more ways than one: the e-commerce giant is seeing a surge in online grocery shopping for basic staples like canned beans and tomato paste.
Amazon immediately put about 2,000 items on its site from the Whole Foods 365 Everyday Value brand and sold out of almost all of the most-popular items, said Spencer Millerberg, chief executive officer of One Click Retail, which monitored sales. Web sales of Whole Foods branded products totaled about $500,000 in the first week, according to One Click Retail’s estimate. More impressive was the speed at which Amazon began selling Whole Foods products online. Such an integration would have taken several months in a brick-and-mortar chain, he said.
“It’s easy to implement and bring everything online with Amazon’s endless shelf,” Millerberg said. He said the question is whether Amazon can sustain the inventory, and use the stores to decrease delivery costs.
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