Amazon gets fresh in China, adds stuff like meat, veg, and cakes

Amazon yesterday launched a new section of its store in China for fresh foods like cakes, fruits and vegetables, and meat and seafood. It’s online here. It’s analogous to the company’s Amazon Fresh, which runs in a handful of US cities, but it works quite differently in China.

Amazon China has tied up with a number of local chains and suppliers to offer 600 fresh food items ready for the launch, reports Chinese tech blog 36Kr.

Unlike Amazon Fresh in the US, Amazon is not handling the logistics or using its own refrigerated vans for the fresh produce sold on its marketplace in China – instead, the suppliers handle all that. Deliveries cover as much of the country as each merchant can manage, but it won’t be swift. Outside of major cities, prepare to wait a few days for the goods to arrive.

Cold cuts

Amazon’s move into fresh groceries in China is rather late. All of its larger ecommerce rivals in the country – like Alibaba’s Tmall, JD, and Walmart’s Yihaodian – have offered fresh produce for some time. The news comes a day after JD led a US$70 million investment in fresh produce etailer FruitDay.

Amazon China has long struggled, trailing behind Alibaba’s two marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, as well as other homegrown rivals like JD and Suning. Amazon was China’s eighth biggest estore at the end of 2014, with just 1.3 percent market share of transaction value, according to data from iResearch. Tmall dominates the market with 57.6 percent market share.

See: Alibaba wants its merchants to ditch PCs, just use smartphones

(Source: 36Kr)