Walmart and Amazon: the fight for e-fresh

Call it the battle for fresh baskets: Amazon and Walmart are duking it out online. But the fight is to see who can sell the most broccoli, not the most books.

Walmart has been ramping up its online presence lately, letting shoppers buy online and then pick products up at its stores. The retailer is even hoping to try out crowdsourcing, in which customers actually do deliveries for others consumers.

READ: Walmart looking at crowdsourcing

Meanwhile, Amazon's Fresh same-day delivery service is available in Seattle and could be expanded to California.

Why the focus on groceries? E-commerce sales overall are rising 11 per cent a year but online grocery sales are growing nearly 20 per cent, Todd Hale, senior vice-president at Nielsen told Forbes magazine.

“This is the space Walmart has to go after: perishable items. That’s where they need the infrastructure…“Groceries will be the battleground coming to the forefront.”

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