Mercadona prepares for shopping on the web with new stores

Mercadona prepares for shopping on the web with new stores

The supermarket will install a warehouse in Madrid of 14,500 m2 that will be operational by 2020 to serve the entire city and nearby municipalities

  In Spain, few people buy food online. A recent poll conducted by the consultancy The Cocktail revealed that only 17% of consumers had used this channel at least once this year to fill their pantry, a figure that triples in other countries such as the United Kingdom.

The big guys want to make their share of the pie when the business starts to take off and Mercadona is the main stakeholder. In its strategy to bet on the online sales channel and that distribution giants like Amazon do not step on the heels, the Valencian company has just announced that it has rented a warehouse of 14,500 square meters in Getafe (Madrid) to build an online warehouse with which to develop your e-commerce project in Madrid.

  The warehouse or hive - as the company calls it - will be operational from 2020 and will be added to another one that will be located in Vallecas and whose works will begin this next year, according to the chain's announcement on Thursday.

They will not be the first warehouses with this objective that the company has, since it has a center like this in a polygon of Valencia where since last May it started the first online shopping services with a pilot test attending the city of Valencia and some nearby municipalities.

The web, your Achilles heel
To complete this deployment, Mercadona has also bought some land in Ripollet (Barcelona) to install the second warehouse of these characteristics in Catalonia in 2022 , after which it has planned for 2020 in the Zona Franca de Barcelona.

The undisputed leader in the food sector in Spain, with more than 24% market share (triple that of its direct competitors, Carrefour and Dia), had an Achilles heel: its online sales service. Starting in May, the new website for pilot tests was put into operation in Valencia. Its president, Juan Roig, had no problem in describing the Mercadona website as "shit" two years ago. But he has the philosophy that we must constantly reinvent ourselves to remain leaders and that is why he entrusted his daughter, Juana Roig, to lead the project of remodeling this service that until that month of May barely accounted for 1% of its turnover.