Specialty grocers thrive on the Net
The high-profile crashes of Webvan and other online grocers has not affected the specialty grocery sites. The latest to report survival: MexGrocer.com, which is coming up on its first birthday. “We have been very conservative,” Igancio Hernandez, president, tells Internet Retailer.
MexGrocer.com sells only packaged food products—not perishables—and it relies on its largest supplier and one of its largest investors, Royal Crown Foods, to inventory and pick, pack and ship its merchandise. It ships via UPS.
MexGrocer.com also has been cautious in advertising. It engages primarily in online marketing, having registered 800 keywords with search engines. It also employs online ads at Yahoo and Google and maintains a Yahoo store.
MexGrocer.com sells about 1,000 products. It runs it business with a staff of five. It registers up to 120,000 visitors a month and has 6,000 customers in 1,700 cities in the U.S. It also features a selection of Mexican cookbooks, which Hernandez says attracts buyers. It recently added wholesale sales to supply Mexican restaurants and independent Mexican food stores.
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