Dinner is a click away for online shoppers

Each Wednesday night, Erin Forsyth does a week's worth of grocery shopping without dragging her children around, battling crowds or standing in line.

She shops online.

"It's made my life so much easier," the Chesterfield County mother of two said of her newfound joy of online grocery shopping.

A friend introduced Forsyth to the new way of shopping in September, and she hasn't looked back. "I love it."

A day after placing her order, she gets her groceries at a pickup point near her son's elementary school.

As the world becomes ever more technological and the demand on people's time increases, consumers such as Forsyth are choosing to buy groceries from the comfort of their offices or homes and have them delivered rather than shop at a traditional supermarket.

"It's terribly convenient," said Barb Upchurch, a mother who lives in Richmond's Fan District and was introduced to online grocery shopping when she lived in London. She moved here in 2003.

The two women use RelayFoods.com, a Charlottesville-based company that started serving the Richmond area last year.

Relay partners with about 50 local vendors, including grocery stores, butcher shops and farms. Among the companies selling through Relay are Cavanna Pasta, Carytown Cupcakes, the Market at Tobacco Row, Good Foods Grocery and Wolf Creek Farm.

Each vendor has its own section on the website with photos and details of the products for sale. Customers log on, browse through the site and compile a list.

Shoppers can get gourmet cheeses and wine along with grocery staples, including toilet paper, fruits and frozen foods.

At midnight, Relay sends the orders to the vendors, which collect them the next morning and then bundle them for customers at a warehouse in Richmond's Scott's Addition north of West Broad Street and west of North Boulevard. The orders are then delivered to one of 15 drop-off spots or to the customer's home.

The vendors are charged a fee, but Relay wouldn't discuss the billing structure.

Customers pay nothing for the service. If they want their groceries delivered to their homes or offices, they pay from $12 for a single trip to $333 for 52 deliveries. Forsyth and Upchurch say the first couple of times they used the service it was time-consuming as they tried to figure out how the system worked. But Relay keeps their shopping lists, making subsequent visits much faster.

Online shopping is a welcome alternative to heading out to grocery stores, Upchurch said. "I think for working parents with young kids, it's ideal."

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Online grocery shopping is fairly rare outside major U.S. metropolitan areas.

Relay offers it in Charlottesville and Richmond — and plans to expand its concept to other midsize markets.

Kroger and Food Lion don't offer the service locally, but Kroger offers online shopping in some of its markets.

Martin's Food Markets' parent company, Royal Ahold, owns Peapod, which serves customers in 12 states, including parts of Northern Virginia. The company delivered groceries to more than 350,000 customers in 2009 and processed 15 million orders since it was founded in 1989.

Peapod has no immediate plans to expand to Richmond, the company said.

"While we have no announcements at this time about the Richmond market, our goal is to continue to offer Peapod in more locations and to more customers throughout our market area," said Tracy Pawelski, a spokeswoman for Martin's.

In the U.S., online grocery shopping has been successful mostly in metropolitan markets with a high concentration of people in a small geographic area, such as New York City and Washington.

Some grocers, including Harris Teeter, allow shoppers to place orders online and pick them up at stores.

In the United Kingdom, it's a different story.

In 2010, 20 percent of families in the U.K. made at least one grocery purchase online, according to a report last year by London-based Verdict Research.

And that's expected to continue growing.

About 3.8 percent of total grocery sales were made online in the U.K. last year, Verdict said. By 2014, Verdict predicts that 5.2 percent of total grocery sales in the U.K. will take place online.

Lucy Lowe, a spokeswoman for British multinational grocery-chain Tesco Stores LTD, said the company sees online grocery shopping simply as another way to reach consumers.

"We have a multichannel approach so that people can shop how they want to, be that home, in store, through their mobile," she said.

Tesco, which launched the service in 2000, offers online grocery shopping in Britain, Northern Ireland and South Korea.

The number of customers shopping online grew 10 percent last year to 1.2 million, Lowe said. Last year, the company delivered 1 billion items.

Online shoppers get many of the same benefits as store shoppers, she said, but with the added convenience. The company does not charge a fee.

"By shopping online, customers benefit from groceries delivered to their door seven days a week, the same low prices we have in store and regular in-store offers plus recipes, money-saving tips and (loyalty) card points," Lowe said.

To expand its offerings, Tesco is working on several innovations, including an iPhone app that allows shoppers to add items to their online shopping list by scanning a barcode and a service that lets shoppers order groceries online and pick them up at stores within two hours.

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One reason online grocery shopping hasn't taken off in the U.S. outside densely populated cities is because it's hard to make money on the delivery as most customers aren't willing to pay for the service, grocery experts say.

In densely populated areas such as New York, for instance, several hundred people can live in a single building and there are several buildings in a block, which make home delivery economics work.

Arnie Katz, Relay's president and chief operating officer, said his company has made it work by centralizing delivery.

Relay said 80 percent of its shoppers choose to pick up items rather than have them delivered to their homes.

In the Richmond area, shoppers can pick up their bundled groceries throughout the week at 15 locations. Within a couple of years, the area should have more than a dozen pickup locations available daily.

Relay schedules pickup, which generally happens from 3 to 7 p.m., around the times schools let out and people generally get off work.

During the summer when her 7-year-old son is out of school, Chesterfield's Forsyth will switch either to a pickup location closer to home or have the groceries delivered to her house.

Giving shoppers convenient options for where to pick up their groceries is the key to making Relay a success, Katz said.

Relay has seen more than 40 percent month-over-month growth in sales and in the number of customers since it began offering the service in the Richmond area in July.

Sales here grew 71 percent in January compared with December, the company said.

The company plans to expand beyond central Virginia and sees the Raleigh, N.C., area as one of several potential target cities, he said.

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Donnie Caffery, owner of the local Good Foods Grocery natural-food stores, has embraced Relay as a way to attract new customers.

"Some people just don't like to shop," Caffery said.

Caffery, who signed on with Relay last year, said that selling his products online allows him to reach a broader customer base and better serve current customers.

While Good Foods — and all vendors — pays a fee to Relay, Caffery said the investment is small because he picks up sales without having to make the large expenditures in overhead to reach the additional customers.

Caffery wouldn't give exact numbers on how Relay has helped his bottom line, but he said the number of orders has been increasing. For instance, it took 20 minutes to bundle orders in his early days with Relay, but he now has so many orders that it takes more than an hour.

For customers, the advantage is that they get access to grocers and products they might not otherwise reach without driving to the other side of town on a day off — which many are unlikely to do.

Forsyth is one of Good Foods' new shoppers.

Without Relay, she said, she wouldn't have had the time to shop at one of the grocer's two stores or at other new favorite shops, such as the Butcher at Bon Air or Mediterranean Bakery & Deli on Quioccasin Road in Henrico County.

"I get a whole variety of options that I honestly wouldn't get otherwise," she said.

LLLovio@timesdispatch.com

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