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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Online food delivery has worked for years and I believe is profitable, at least in the UK.

No one is currently making any money in online food delivery in the UK (unless you count Just Eat, who had the fantastic idea of doing away with any sort of logistics on their part). There's definitely potential for the market to be huge as people become more comfortable with the idea of having someone else pick their bananas for them though.

Unless I'm mistaken, Ocado is still not profitable even if it's been at it for 13 years.

There's an online shoe/fashion retailer in Germany (Zalando, because faux Italian is the new dot-com) that's apparently following Amazon's "every sale is a loss but we're making up for it in volume" model. They're ridiculously successful (in terms of sales and market share) and often held up as an example for successful tech companies.

I'm not entirely sure what their long term plan is, but I'm hoping this is just an attempt to establish a monopoly that can then be exploited to turn the operation into a profit.

Zalando is already giving profits since Q2 2014.

Interesting. Is this in any way correlated to the change in legislature regarding free returns? Many armchair economists were speculating that that would be one of the biggest financial pain points.

Apparently, Ocado did indeed finally turn a profit this year:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/marketforceslive/2014/ju...

A pity to see even they're running so lean on the profit margins - I've found them to offer the best organised process for actually getting the groceries inside, where all the crates are staged first, then the bags unhooked and hefted inside, taking very little time at all, versus the loose bags or even completely loose items of the other supermarket delivery operations.

Most people use food delivery services run inhouse by the major supermarkets, which also means that it's hard to tell whether or not they're profitable. Tesco claims that theirs is (though not masively so) but it's not clear how accurate their figures are, and the competing supermarkets refuse to provide that information.

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