Insights
Insights
This is part two of a three-part series on grocery delivery infrastructure. Read part one on why delivery is grocery's growth engine, and part three on building infrastructure that scales.
On the surface, grocery growth looks stable. In May 2025, total grocery sales grew just 3 percent year over year. Look closer and a different story emerges: delivery surged 70 percent, to $3.9 billion, nearly half of all eGrocery sales.
The shopper is sending a clear signal. Delivery has become the main way customers shop, and a driver of loyalty. The biggest players are acting on it. Walmart now delivers to 93 to 95 percent of US households, often within three hours, on geospatial planning and a hybrid fulfillment network. Amazon has committed $4 billion to expand same-day delivery into 4,000 rural towns. For them, delivery is the differentiator.
Regional grocers, by contrast, often still treat delivery as an operational patch. Many rely on a third-party platform to check the box: fast to launch, low complexity, little internal lift. That convenience carries a long-term cost. This post breaks down the trade-offs of handing delivery to a third-party platform, the data behind them, and why owning the decision layer is the path to long-term growth.
Outsourced delivery helps a grocer move fast. The infrastructure is built, the customer base is active, and there is no need to hire drivers or build internal systems. On the surface it looks like a win. The trade-offs stack up quietly, and they undermine what makes delivery grow a business. When a grocer fully outsources delivery:
In June 2025, delivery sales grew 29 percent year over year. Not everyone benefited. One in four households that placed a supermarket order also placed one with Walmart that same month, up 400 basis points on the year before. Supermarkets lost more than two points of primary grocery share while Walmart and the hard discounters gained. That is what delivery leakage looks like in real time: shoppers drifting to the ecosystems that offer better perks, faster feedback and more control.
Outsourcing checks a short-term box and caps what a grocer can influence. Margins shrink under platform fees. Retention suffers when the experience slips. Shopper data flows out of the business. Retail media opportunities disappear. Loyalty gets harder to earn and easier to lose. Many regional grocers sit in what part one called stage two or stage three of the delivery maturity curve: dependent on a third-party platform, or running basic orchestration without visibility or control. Those models work for a time. They are not built for the long run.
Nobody publishes a grocery commission rate, so the clearest numbers are the ones each side reports about itself. US food retail ran a net margin of about 2 percent in 2025, per FMI, and the two largest public supermarket chains came in under that. The largest grocery delivery marketplace, in its own annual filing, reports transaction revenue equal to about 7 percent of the value of the orders it handles and advertising revenue equal to another 3 percent, which comes to roughly 10 cents of every order dollar. Set those side by side: an order that runs through a marketplace carries a take of about five times the grocer's entire net margin. The retailer's own share of that take is a contract term each grocer already knows.
Two more leaks sit outside the commission. The first is the shopper-facing markup. Marketplaces have said in their own words that item prices on the platform run higher than in the store, an independent test found different shoppers paying different prices for the same item at the same moment, and a federal order required $60 million in refunds over hidden fees. The shopper blames the banner, not the app. The second is retail media: the ad revenue in that filing is roughly the size of the largest grocer-owned media network, and every marketplace order moves brand dollars from the grocer's network to the platform's. One of the big-two supermarket chains has attributed a gross-margin decline to delivery and handling costs tied to digital growth two quarters running. Delivery growth that runs on someone else's rails is margin-negative at the biggest scale there is.
Every delivery carries more than groceries. It carries signals about who the customer is, what matters to them, and how the operation performs.
What first-party delivery data gives a grocer
Order frequency and location feed better demand forecasts: less spoilage, fewer out-of-stocks, less over-ordering.
Fulfillment performance tracked in real time shows late deliveries, routing gaps and missed substitutions while they can still be fixed.
A grocer that owns its data can segment audiences, target ads and measure return.
First-party data is the foundation for recommendation engines, automated fulfillment logic and predictive inventory.
Direct access to shopping patterns makes targeted promotions, recommendations and loyalty programs possible.
This is the infrastructure the platforms already use to win. Marketplace players are doing more than delivering groceries. They are building multi-billion-dollar ecosystems on shopper data, and a grocer without access to its own data cannot compete on targeting, loyalty or media. The disadvantage compounds. When fulfillment data lives outside the business there is no view of what is working or what is going wrong. The grocer reacts to problems instead of preventing them, and cannot segment churned customers, test a delivery promotion, or forecast a shift in volume. Owning the data puts those levers back in reach. It turns delivery from a cost center into an advantage.
A grocer that relies on a third party also struggles to build digital loyalty that sticks. If the delivery experience happens on another company's platform, there is almost no way to reward repeat purchases, offer exclusive perks, or recover lapsed shoppers. There is no feedback at all, because the data, the interface and the messaging all belong to someone else.
Meanwhile the national players set the bar. Their closed ecosystems offer speed, perks and personalization that keep shoppers coming back, and it is working: in May 2025, one in four supermarket eGrocery customers also placed a Walmart order that month, and the overlap is growing. Regional grocers should build their own: experiences that deepen the relationship, reward repeat behavior, and make the next order easier than the last.
One shopper, two grocers
Mia shops for groceries weekly and values convenience.
How she orders
Through the platform's app
Her experience
Sees competitors' deals beside Grocer A's basket. Gets no offers from the store she chose.
What Grocer A knows
Nothing. The store never learns she is a weekly customer, cannot reward her, cannot win her back.
The outcome
A national player shows her lower prices and free delivery with a membership. She switches, and the store finds out by watching a number fall.
How she orders
From the grocer's own site, delivered by whichever provider fits the order
Her experience
A loyalty perk after five orders. Recommendations that fit what she buys.
What Grocer B knows
Her order history, her delivery preferences, and when she goes quiet.
The outcome
She keeps ordering weekly and signs up for the subscription program.
Say a grocer has 20,000 monthly eGrocery customers and 30 percent of them order through a third-party platform. That is 6,000 customers whose behavior the grocer cannot track, whose loyalty it cannot influence, and whose repeat business is at risk. Assume 20 percent of them start ordering regularly from a competitor with a better digital loyalty experience, and each spends $50 a month online. That is 1,200 customers times $50 times 12 months: $720,000 a year in shifted spend. At a 25 percent gross margin, $180,000 a year in lost profit, from one segment. These are shoppers who already liked the brand enough to order once. Without owned delivery, the grocer never gets the chance to keep them.
Owning the delivery decision gives a grocer control over its growth. Orchestration puts pricing, routing, timing and performance back in the grocer's hands, across every kind of capacity: its own vans, 3PLs and courier networks together, each order assigned to the option that fits its window, its temperature and its cost. The third-party networks stay in the mix as capacity. The storefront, the account, the order data and the decision stay with the grocer.
Grocers that invest in their own delivery infrastructure build systems that protect margin, strengthen loyalty, and scale with the business. Part three shows what it takes to build that infrastructure at every stage.