After over a decade of caution, paired with a few false starts and missteps along the way, the world’s largest advertisers, namely consumer packaged goods manufacturers, are getting serious about selling their wares online. The makers of much of what fills the shelves of our nation’s grocery stores, drugstores and mass merchants are exploring new ways to use the web not just to promote their brands, but to finally sell their products directly to consumers.
Today, manufacturers of brands from Tide to Colgate to Huggies (and everything in between) derive a minuscule amount of their sales online. Inevitably, that will change as consumers look for additional ways to use technology to simplify their everyday shopping habits. Retailers like Drugstore.com, Walmart, CVS and Amazon.com hope the future is now. Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program, for example, has been around for a couple years now and attracts a slowly growing, albeit modest, base of shoppers. Under the program, consumers can save 15% on specific everyday products, such as diapers, if they sign-up for automatic reordering (Amazon also offers free shipping on orders over $30.) Subscribe and Save attracted 68,000 shoppers in July, up a 21% over last year. Judging by the fairly limited assortment of eligible products, however, the effort has yet to be fully embraced by manufacturers.
In June, a new venture dubbed “Alice” (yes, you guessed it, named after the Brady Bunch’s affable housekeeper) debuted offering consumers a slick new way to purchase everyday products online and have them shipped for free. Unlike past efforts, Alice is unique in that it is does not act as a retailer. Rather, Alice serves as a conduit through which manufacturers can sell directly to consumers. The manufacturers set their own prices and receive the sales proceeds. Alice handles order fulfillment, shipping and the customer experience. Anyone who has previously shopped online for household
