Americans are increasingly turning to the internet to make their purchases, creating a $808 billion market last year. Retailers all want a slice of this pie, so they're beefing up their delivery offerings to compete on delivery deals. More and more of us expect our packages to arrive quickly and for a low fee -- or even free.
In this clip from Industry Focus: Consumer Goods, Motley Fool analysts Vincent Shen and Sarah Priestley talk about this competitive flashpoint for retailers and what it means for the commercial drone market.
A full transcript follows the video.
This podcast was recorded on Sept. 20, 2016.
Vincent Shen: Obviously been a huge trend for e-commerce, which is the impact of delivery, and you mentioned Amazon Air, and the fact that a lot of e-commerce retailers are challenging the traditional retailers, and challenging consumers to think that maybe, "It's easier for me to order something, essentially, from the comfort of my couch than it is to make the drive 10 minutes, 15 minutes," or even farther for some people, as we'll get to, "to go to the store to buy something."
Sarah Priestley: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, for a long time, been the preserve of sci-fi movies, but now it's starting to become a reality. I don't know how quickly it will actually happen for consumers. But if you look, in 2015, just business-to-consumer -- so, excluding business-to-business -- the online retail market was $808 billion. There is a huge amount of consumer expectation over how quickly they're going to receive those packages. I think that's, essentially, created a huge pressure point, and a competitive pressure point, for retailers and how they're competing over free delivery -- which obviously is not free for them -- and immediate delivery, which is what we're talking about now.
