The worst decline of the stock market since October 2008. E-commerce news by Nabil.

While the stock traders were watching all the recent weeks’ gains disappear, the race on e-commerce dominance continued with some major major announcements!!

–          Amazon goes big into cashier-free grocery stores! This is big big!!

–          Walmart+ membership coming soon! Will it work?

–          Panera Bread is launching a coffee subscription!

–          Walmart change its organizational structure to truly deliver omnichannel experiences

–          Lazada deliveries explode in Singapore with Coronavirus, expect the same in the US soon!

–          Zalando pushes into the luxury clothing sector

–          Dahmakan Startup raises 18M for ‘full-stack’ food delivery startup

 Amazon launches its first cashier-free grocery store in Seattle

In Dec 2016, Amazon announced Amazon Go clearly leading the way on what the future of convenience stores will look like!

In June 2017, they bought whole food for 13Bln, showing a huge move into the “traditional brick & mortar” business while the company was seen as an online e-commerce company “only”.

Here is where Bezos is connecting the dots….This is big big news!! The company opened this week its first full-size cashierless grocery store in Seattle’s. The 10,400-sq.-ft. location joins 25 Amazon Go convenience stores around the country freeing shoppers from checkout lines and small talk.

Grocery is an $800 billion industry, but just 3% of U.S. groceries are ordered online so it’s obvious that Amazon wants to tap into the instore business but offering a unique experience!

When you are Amazon and you announce great innovations and changes every week, this announcement seems almost like “just another one” but this is not just another gadget or solutions, this could change the retail landscape in a very short time!!

Learn more about Amazon’s first cashier-free grocery store HERE.

Walmart is quietly working on an Amazon Prime competitor called Walmart+

After The Iphone+, Disney +, ESPN+, we have now Walmart+ coming soon!

Walmart is reportedly starting a new membership program, it’s still in development mode, and will have to accelerate and be very attractive to compete & catch up with Amazon Prime’s 100 million members and huge offering.

Check out the news about Walmart+ HERE.

Panera Bread is launching a coffee subscription program

Following the success of some pioneers in the subscription programs like Dollar Shave Club, we have seen in recent years subscription programs for everything and anything, from mobility services to clothing, wines…etc.., you even have a magical subscription box for Harry Potter fans, I’m not kidding… So no wonder Panera Bread is considering joining the trend and offering a coffee subscription for $8.99 a month, I’m wondering what people at Starbucks are thinking about that? 8.99, it’s like 2 lattes at Starbucks.

Get some insight into the Panera Bread coffee subscription program HERE.

Walmart merges store and online buying after decades of siloed operations

Every time I meet customers coming from strong brick & mortar legacy business to discuss e-commerce strategies, I always tell them that it’s critically important to look at building a holistic strategy which is linked between on & offline business! Putting the consumer at the centre of the strategy and avoiding organizations siloes is critical to be successful, the consumers of today don’t care about your organizational structure, they want a unified experience online & in the physical interaction and they want this to be all in sync! The famous “Omnichannel Experience” which you see in every presentation but not in the real world! I think this is a great move for Walmart to consolidate its digital and in-store buying teams into one merchandising organization, this will truly change the ability of the company to go head to head with Amazon! 

Read more about the consolidation HERE.

Alibaba-owned Lazada sees ‘unprecedented demand’ for online grocery in Singapore

E-commerce firm Lazada’s grocery arm RedMart told it sees “unprecedented demand” in Singapore after a brief period of panic-buying amid the coronavirus outbreak. If the virus continue to spread we can expect a huge growth for all the online purchases. One company that could highly benefit of this situation is Doordash as they are preparing for their IPO just in time when the Coronavirus has killed the first US citizen and we will surely see more online ordering in the coming weeks & months… 

CNBC has a good report about the above-mentioned +unprecedented demand’.

Online fashion retailer Zalando pushes into luxury clothing sector

Zalando has unveiled an ambitious push into the €38bn luxury clothing segment. Europe’s largest online fashion retailer said there was a clear trend among shoppers to make more high-value purchases online. While it was hard few years ago to consider luxury items being sold & purchased online, this is now just the norm! Very good move for Zalando and will be interesting to see how they compete with some of the other marketplaces which have specialized in the premium segments like Farfetch.

Check out the details of Zalando’s luxury clothes HERE.

StartUp of the week

Dahmakan, a Malaysian ‘full-stack’ food delivery startup, raises $18M Series B

There are so many delivery startups raising a huge amount of money but I think this is a particularly interesting model! I love the concept of Dahmakan which is very similar to what Reef Technology is building in the US, a truly full-service offering for food delivery. The foundation of the startup’s full-stack platform is an operating system that controls nearly every step of its operations, from recipe development to last-mile delivery, and its cloud kitchens are part of “satellite” hubs placed around different cities to be closer to customers

Learn more about Dahmakan HERE.