While Amazon has been signaling serious commitment to online food retailing, the past is littered with companies that cumulatively spent billions in venture capital on various online grocery businesses. If these problems can be solved, the combination of Amazon and Whole Foods is probably the last and best chance for anyone to succeed in the online grocery retail space. Others have already suggested that Amazon could use Whole Food stores as pick up points for online purchases completely unrelated to groceries. More likely, and promising, is that Amazon might use Whole Foods to blend online and in-store food retailing. If Amazon and Whole Foods go down this road, they won’t have proven pure online grocery retailing can be successful.

Source: Forbes June 18, 2017 15:56 UTC