Aldi U.S. to up the ante in online grocery

Aldi U.S. aims to get more serious with its website — in a big way.

The discount grocer’s Germany-based parent company said Tuesday that it’s working with e-commerce specialist Spryker Systems to develop a new online food and grocery shopping experience for the U.S. market, including grocery delivery and/or curbside pickup service.

According to Aldi, the new digital commerce platform is now being tested with a group of U.S. customers and is slated to be rolled out nationally in phases. Batavia, Ill.-based Aldi U.S. currently operates about 2,200 stores in 38 states.

“Our partnership with Spryker will allow our shoppers another way to access the incredible value they expect from Aldi,” Scott Patton, vice president of national buying for Aldi U.S., said in a statement.

Aldi's current U.S. consumer website is informational-only, not offering search or shopping functionality.

Late last month, during a tour of an Aldi store in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, Patton said Aldi U.S. was under way with a project to transform its information-only U.S. website into a fully transactional e-commerce site.

“We’re in the process of building that website right now, and it launched to a very small group of customers on Monday [Sept. 19],” he said, adding that he couldn’t disclose details. “It’s in beta test.”

One of the top requests Aldi U.S. fields from customers is whether they carry a certain item and how much it costs, according to Patton. But the new website will go well beyond that functionality, he noted.

Related:Aldi store in Brooklyn showcases chain’s value formula

“The website is coming. As soon as we can get it here, we’re going to have it here,” Patton said. “And it will be a shoppable website, with prices, products — all of the things that consumers want.”

Aldi U.S. customers will see a vast improvement over the chain’s current website, Patton added. “It’s not a shoppable website, it’s not a searchable website. That will change,” he said.

Germany-based Spryker, which has its U.S. headquarters in Manhattan, specializes in implementing transactional business models through its cloud-native, enterprise platform-as-a-service solution. The technology provider said its platform is designed to help companies quickly go to market, scale up and customize a broad digital commerce offering.

“Spryker’s composable and headless commerce platform offers a best-of-breed approach, providing enterprises with the flexibility and scalability needed to adjust to a constantly changing market, accelerating digital growth and transformation, and providing consumers with a more seamless and simple shopping experience,” commented Boris Lokschin, co-founder and CEO at Spryker.

Related:Amid rising inflation, Aldi reiterates low price pledge

Thus far, Aldi U.S. has worked with Instacart to build out its omnichannel presence. The retailer aims to expand its Curbside Grocery Pickup service, powered by Instacart, from over 1,200 to 1,500 stores by the end of this year. After an earlier pilot of the service, Aldi had announced a 600-store rollout of curbside pickup in May 2020 and followed that up with another 500-plus curbside sites last year.

Aldi also has partnered with San Francisco-based Instacart to enable electronic benefit transfer payments for online grocery pickup and delivery orders in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Aldi and Instacart kicked off the SNAP EBT integration at over 60 stores in Georgia in November 2020 and then extended the rollout to 570-plus stores in Illinois, California, Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas that December. Later that month, they announced an expanded deployment to another 1,000 stores. The SNAP EBT service is now offered at more than 1,500 Aldi locations.

Aldi announced its online grocery partnership with Instacart in August 2017 and rolled out same-day delivery chainwide in the fall of 2018. Delivery is now available at almost all of Aldi’s stores. The retailer also launched alcohol delivery through Instacart in November 2019.