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Business

Singapore e-marts should offer same-day delivery

Shop, click, and delivery in an hour. Singapore is a perfect place for this to happen, with its ubiquitous shopping malls and megamarts, so why isn't anyone doing it yet?
Written by Howard Lo, Contributor

In America, Google, eBay, Amazon, and the soon-to-be-resurrected Kozmo.com offer same-day delivery, often in under 90 minutes, of almost any product you could want.

It's the ultimate in convenience; sit at your desk, browse the shopping site, click a button to purchase, and the item shows up shortly at your door. Who needs to change out of their pajamas anymore?

Singapore has online supermarkets (Redmart and Cold Storage being two of them) available to shoppers, but neither offer immediate delivery. They also generally build their site around a weekly shopping experience rather than a convenience-store-like daily shopping opportunity.

Wouldn't Singapore be an ideal city for instant delivery for thousands of goods? With the ubiquitous shopping malls and megamarts, a delivery service that partners with these retailers offers a vast selection of merchandise within a short distance from the customer.

There are numerous companies in the U.S. with different business models to look at--Deliv, Postmates, eBay Now, for example. With the high concentration of people in a small area, the lower staffing costs for Singapore, and the availability of merchandise also in such a small area, it seems like an opportunity waiting to happen.

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