Seattle - Web retailer Amazon.com is testing out grocery delivery.
The site quietly began taking orders for fresh produce and other grocery items on Wednesday from residents of Mercer Island, a Seattle suburb, and dispatched a fleet of 12 delivery trucks from its grocery distribution centre in nearby Bellevue to deliver groceries in one-hour time slots.
Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company is working with local wholesalers and farmers and aiming to have inventory sit in the warehouse for less than 24 hours.
The new website, http://fresh.amazon.com, was first available to a small number of Amazon grocery customers on Mercer Island who were invited by e-mail to help test the business. Web surfers can visit the site and type in their address to see if AmazonFresh is available in their neighborhood.
The selection includes organic, kosher, wheat-free and other specialty categories, but not books, music or sporting goods, and the shopping cart and checkout process are completely separate from the main Amazon.com site.
Berman said Amazon is starting very small, and that there is no telling whether the company will expand the program beyond the island community of about 22 000.
The low-profile launch of the service is understandable given the collapse of delivery services like Kozmo.com, Urbanfetch, Webvan and HomeGrocer.com (in which Amazon invested $42.5m before Webvan acquired it) during the dot-com bubble.
Webvan, a grocery service that boasted 750 000 customers in cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago, burned through $830m in two years before filing for bankruptcy protection in 2001.
Peapod LLC, one of the dot-com survivors, still delivers groceries in several states, some in conjunction with the Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. Safeway also lets customers in six states and Washington, DC, order groceries online.
FreshDirect, a New York-area grocery service, launched after the dust from the crash cleared. The service has amassed a devoted following, especially among busy professionals who don't have cars and want more selection than is available in their small, neighbourhood stores.
Berman would not address whether the company had learned lessons from the failed efforts or the success stories, but did say Amazon's nonperishable grocery business, which started last year, has helped the company work up to fresh produce.
"We feel comfortable being able to provide a very high quality service to customers," he said.
- AP