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Walmart’s latest grocery experiment involves stocking your fridge when you’re not home

Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Walmart is now offering to stock your fridge for you—even if you’re not home. 

The big-box giant is teaming with a smart lock startup called August Home to test a service in which workers would use a temporary door code to deliver groceries straight to your kitchen.

“Think about that—someone else does the shopping for you AND puts it all away,” Walmart vp Sloan Eddleston wrote in a blog post announcing the test. “This may not be for everyone–and certainly not right away–but we want to offer customers the opportunity to participate in tests.”

SEE ALSO: Walmart is getting hip, but it’s keeping it a bit of a secret

The deliveries will be monitored by security cameras provided by the startup, and customers will have the option of watching the process in real-time via an app. The couriers—contracted through the startup Deliv—will only let themselves in if no one answers August Home’s smart doorbell, which triggers a smartphone notification when pressed.

The trial is currently limited to a small group of August Home customers in Silicon Valley.

Walmart’s been doubling down on sometimes-quirky experiments like these as it looks for new ways to challenge Amazon’s dominance of the online shopping market. The online grocery market has been one of the most cutthroat fronts of that battle, especially since Amazon took over Whole Foods in a blockbuster deal this summer.

Some of its other tests include a service in which its employees drop off online orders on their way home from work, a giant grocery vending machine in the parking lot of some stores, and drive-thru store pick-up. It also announced this week that it will begin accepting food stamps for online grocery orders for the first time.

Despite its vast potential, online grocery still only makes up about one percent of the total market, and surveys show most Americans still aren’t very comfortable with online grocery shopping altogether. So if the idea of delivery people shuffling through people’s kitchens does catch on, it probably won’t be anytime soon.

WATCH: Amazon’s new meal kits are already available to select Prime members

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/09/24/walmart-smart-lock-grocery-delivery/

ecommerce

Amazon launched Prime Now in Singapore and sold 3 times the volume that it did in Seattle. Here’s how.

Amazon staff in Singapore at the Prime Now warehouse
Image: victoria ho/mashable

People were surprised when Amazon launched its two-hour delivery service, Prime Now, in Singapore last month. Unlike other countries where it launched Prime Now, the e-commerce giant didn’t have a retail presence here to begin.

So going from no Amazon at all to the ultra high pressure two-hour Prime Now delivery service certainly raised eyebrows.

SEE ALSO: Amazon’s new Prime Now warehouse in Singapore is absolutely massive

Customers responded by calling for an avalanche of orders on launch day, July 27. Singaporeans were so enthusiastic, Amazon’s first day here closed three times the order volume in this tiny island, than it did when it launched in its home city of Seattle in 2015.

And as the orders piled up, the app started showing delivery was “unavailable” within the day as Amazon ran out of physical delivery folks to fulfill orders.

But because it was relying on multiple third party logistics services, instead of running delivery itself, it could ramp up capacity over the next day by requesting for more help.

The company was so serious about making good on its two-hour promise, it sent off some of its warehouse officers in Ubers and cabs to make deliveries, too, confirmed Henry Low, director of Amazon Prime Now for Asia-Pacific.

With that, Amazon pulled off its biggest Prime Now launch in its history.

Amazon closed three times the order volume in this tiny island than it did when it launched in its home city of Seattle in 2015.

Singapore packs its 5.5 million people into a metropolis of just 710 square kilometers (274 square miles), with most of its residents living in high-rise apartment buildings. Amazon serves the country out of a single warehouse — its largest Prime Now facility yet, at 100,000 square feet. 

Seventy-nine of the 80 postal districts that cover Singapore have made orders in the month since Prime Now launched.

How Amazon did it: data, data, data

Amazon had already offered two-day or next-day delivery in the U.S., UK, and Japan, which has allowed it to iron out its processes in the lead up to offering Prime Now.

In Singapore though, it had to come out with a bang and go straight into two- and one-hour delivery, without the luxury of testing it out in real life.

To get it right, the secret was Singapore’s fairly unique postal code system, Low said. Each six-digit number corresponds to an individual building — and not a broader district, as it does in other countries.

This gave the company sufficient granularity to run in-depth simulations on delivery routes right to a customer’s doorstep. It could also develop more sophisticated models, with data it had on what customer sets would likely order from Prime Now, and when.

In addition, Amazon has years of historical data on Singaporean buying patterns on Amazon (the slow, non-Prime Now way). All of this helped its predictive systems see into the future, providing a picture of how the real day would likely play out, Low explained.

Local goods on the warehouse shelf.

Image: victoria ho/mashable

And what are Singaporeans buying? The top five items in its first month of operation are toilet paper, green tea, fresh milk, hot and spicy potato chips, and — curiously — broccoli.

Apart from groceries, Amazon has also delivered a toy flamingo set, and a car transmission cooler here.

Low said Amazon is keen to be in Singapore, despite its small size, because the country’s tech-obsessed citizens are super connected and “love shopping.”

Plus, Amazon hopes to plug into the talent pool here, he added. “The business environment allows us to experiment with various innovations like new payment services, that we haven’t before.”

All well and good, but our only question is, who’s ordering all that broccoli? 

WATCH: Amazon’s new meal kits are already available to select Prime members

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/09/21/amazon-prime-now-singapore-one-month-later/

expense manager

Nestl acquires a majority stake in Blue Bottle Coffee at a valuation north of $700M

Blue Bottle Coffee, one of Silicon Valley’s favorite coffee projects, is selling a majority stake to Nestlé in a big semi-acquisition this morning that’s no doubt going to validate a lot of interest in the potential of coffee markets.

Nestlé is acquiring a 68% stake in the company, and it t looks like the leadership of the company isn’t changing as part of this deal. The Financial Times is reporting that Nestle is paying up to $500 million at a valuation north of $700 million, which we understand is in the right ballpark.

The company has opened up shops in San Francisco, New York, and Tokyo among other cities, and the experience is kind of like walking into an Apple Store. The opportunity there is that if Blue Bottle were to open up a store across from every Starbucks and acquire a customer with more value than one looking to get in and out of the shop as quickly as possible, it could potentially create a pretty substantial coffee business — even if it captured only a fraction of Starbucks’ market.

“Blue Bottle Coffee is the biggest brand in specialty coffee in America and Japan today,” Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi said in a statement. “Their success is a testament to James and Bryan’ genius and ability to create a unique sense of value that’s translated into a large, loyal following. It’s the power of the Blue Bottle brand that attracted us to invest early on, and it’s been incredibly gratifying to watch them build an enduring company.”

Coffee shops have been a favorite pet project of Silicon Valley investors, which have poured a ton of money into operations like Blue Bottle and Philz. This also isn’t Nestlé’s first big effort in coffee, as it owns the Nespresso one-shot coffee machine that’s a competitor to the Keurig, as well as the Nescafé brand. Blue Bottle has also been a prolific product producer (say that three times fast) by rolling out little cartons of its coffee and placing them in retail outlets, much like Starbucks does.

Ironically, we noted a little while back that Amazon should try picking up a coffee shop like Blue Bottle or Philz based on the market opportunity against a competitor like Starbucks and the opportunity to expand its Prime footprint. Nestlé has plenty of coffee brands in its portfolio, but a deal of this scale just shows that these coffee startups maybe shouldn’t still be treated as experiments — though they may require a well-capitalized parent (like Amazon or Nestlé) to expand to the level of Starbucks.

Independently, Blue Bottle raised more than $100 million, and we had actually heard some whispers that it might be checking into potential financing about a year ago — though, at the time, the company outright said this wasn’t happening and that it had not held any conversations with investors at any point about additional financing since the previous round. Either way, a year is quite a long time for a story like Blue Bottle to play out, which hopes to have opened 25 new cafes by the end of the year.

A representative from Blue Bottle said they would not comment on the specifics of the deal or the valuation of the company.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/14/nestle-acquires-a-majority-stake-in-blue-bottle-coffee/

expense manager

A Donald Trump tweet knocked $6 billion off Amazon’s value

Image: alex wong/Getty Images

Donald Trump knocked $6 billion off of Amazon before most of the country was awake.

In a tweet sent at 6:12 a.m. EST, Trump claimed Amazon was “doing great damage to tax paying retailers,” resulting in the loss of jobs.

SEE ALSO: The number of tweets Donald Trump has sent since becoming president is downright shocking

That immediately sent Amazon shares down sharply, resulting in a decline of around $6 billion of the company’s market capitalization in a matter of minutes.

Image: Google finance

Such is the power of Trump’s tweets.

The move isn’t life threatening for Amazon, which is still worth in excess of $460 billion. It does, however, highlight growing concern that Trump may be willing to target Amazon, which has already stirred rumblings about the need for greater regulation to limit the company’s growing power.

Amazon began to draw Trump’s ire in late 2015 due to CEO Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, which aggressively reported on the Trump campaign.

Trump went after Bezos, claiming that his ownership of the Post was so that he could reduce Amazon taxes. This wouldn’t work, since the Post and Amazon are two entirely separate companies.

That was just the beginning. Since then, Trump has on three other occasions launched tweets at Amazon, including the time the president threatened Amazon with an ‘internet tax.‘

Trump’s latest tweet on Wednesday appears to have been spurred by a Washington Post editorial published Tuesday night entitled “The nation can only weep,” which calls out Trump’s response after Charlottesville.

“That car in Charlottesville did not kill or wound just the 20 bodies it struck. It damaged the nation. Mr. Trump not only failed to help the country heal; he made the wound wider and deeper,” the Post editorial wrote.

WATCH: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s nephew drops the mic on cultural appropriation

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/08/16/donald-trump-amazon-tweet/