Blog for E-business by Abhishek Kumar, 12IT-002, Sec-C

Dear Nilanjan Sir,

The mail contains my blog entry about the lessons learnt by new online grocery store after the failure of Webvan. PFB the article in a different font.

Only one father of the dot-com rise is still innovating today — Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos. And one of Bezos' discovery plans is its food store consignment service, AmazonFresh — that furthermore occurs to be competing in an e-commerce vertical market with inherently reduced profitability.

After all, the $603 billion food store industry sports 1.1% profit margins. And with buyers buying 1.2% of that allowance online, it remains to be glimpsed if anyone can make a decent come back on investment in e-groceries

Webvan is the best demonstration of a business that endeavoured and failed in that quest. It raised $375 million in its November 1999 primary public proposing, achieving a top supply market value of $1.2 billion.

The company bragged about its 26-city expansion plan, marking a $1 billion Bechtel contract to construct high-tech warehouses worth $30 million each. Then, it filed for bankruptcy in July 2001 after mislaying money every year.

But others were slightly more thriving, For demonstration, halt & Shop shopping centres came by PeaPod — it functioned a service that consigned food items ordered online — and still functions as an adjunct to regal Ahold's retail shops which include halt & Shop and monster nourishment.

But a better model of online food store delivery is FreshDirect.Richard Braddock, a former Citigroup executive, FreshDirect was founded in 2004 on the concept of making a earnings.

And FreshDirect has finished that. "In 2009, FreshDirect developed more than $250 million in revenue and it has been money-making since 2008 and was substantially money-making in 2009."

Braddock made the enterprise money-making by functioning in the densely populated New York district before increasing to Philadelphia in 2012, "We run FreshDirect with the concept that profitability does issue and one way that we manage for profitability is by creating and utilising the best clientele database in the enterprise and we use it in real time."

Bezos clearly took a message from FreshDirect's achievement. AmazonFresh begun in 2007 in the Medina and Mercer isle neighborhoods of Seattle and by 2012 had spread to other Seattle communities. On June 10 2012, the service rolled out to a restricted number of Los Angeles zipcodes. 

Bezos has also taken four courses from Webvan's malfunction:

1. Recruit those involved in failed plan

If you liked to get into a new enterprise, you could not be faulted for chartering somebody who had been spectacularly thriving in that new enterprise to run your operation. But Bezos did the opposite — hiring bosses to blame for Webvan's faidirected scheme.

As Reuters reports, AmazonFresh is directed by "Doug Herrington, Peter Ham, Mick Mountz and Mark Mastandrea – previous Webvan agents who have spent years investigating and fixing the problems that led to its demise."

Hiring people who have failed is barely a assurance of future success. But it appears to be employed for Bezos because these four Webvan vets know the enterprise intimately, have considered about what they did wrong, and are keen to prove that they can request the courses learned to revive their reputations.

2. Come by technology created by the failed boss

Mountz founded a robotics company caleed Kiva. Mountz constructed Kiva on concepts and technologies originally evolved at Webvan and that are a key part of AmazonFresh's scheme.

Kiva's product comprised of gigantic frisbee-shaped robots that could be guided via a grid of floor magnets. The robots selected up the warehouse rack encompassing the item in the clientele alignment and consigned it to the operator. He picked the item from the rack; scanned its barcode to verify that it was correct; and put the piece in a carboard box with that customer's shipping mark.

In 2012, Amazon came by Kiva for $775 million in one of its largest-ever acquisitions.

3. Aim on attractive micro-segments

While the food store commerce is gigantic, only a minute fraction of that market is attractive as a location to operate an online food store enterprise. Finding those micro-segments is a crucial element of AmazonDirect's scheme.

Gary Dahl, vice leader of circulation at Webvan from 1997 to 2001, notified Reuters that he learned about the importance of segmenting markets founded on signify travel time between delivery halts. As Dahl said, "travel one block in San Francisco and you have passed 200 people, travel one impede in Moraga and you have passed about six people."

AmazonFresh and FreshDirect only consign to densely populated areas. Keith Anderson, an executive at conferring firm RetailNet assembly, notified Reuters, "If you propel into certain neighborhoods in Seattle you will glimpse a lot of front doors with AmazonFresh totes. That's because Amazon expanded gradually into specific neighborhoods and endeavoured to consign to lots of dwellings in those specific areas."

4. Fix the business model before increasing

One of the most intriguing points of the Webvan case was the company's obsession with getting large-scale fast — its then-CEO, George Shaheen, compared running Webvan to construction a rocket to Mars.

As microphone Moritz, a Webvan board constituent and colleague at Sequoia Capital, notified Reuters, Webvan "committed the cardinal sin of retail, which is to expand into a new territory — in our case some territories — before we had illustrated success in the first market. In fact, we were engaged illustrating malfunction in the Bay locality market while we expanded into other regions."

Through AmazonFresh's very stepwise expansion, Bezos illustrated that he wise from that Webvan mistake.

The four courses he directed from Webvan's flop focus Bezos' broader message for managers: winning flows from focusing the best brains and expertise on making life better for consumers.

Thanks & Regards,

Abhishek

12IT-002