Out of ketchup? Go grocery shopping with Quidsi

Quidsi's Soap.com launches a grocery category with nearly 10K items ready for ordering

Moms are responsible for some $2 trillion in consumer spending in the U.S. and control roughly 80% of all household expenses.  Think about where all that money goes—groceries, household stuff, kids’ clothes, pet supplies, I imagine lots of paper towels and Lysol…that’s exhausting.  Quidsi has tapped into that buying power with sites geared specifically towards the mom demographic, such as Diapers.com, Wag.com, Soap.com, BeautyBar.com, and, most recently, Yoyo.com.  Now, Quidsi is simplifying the hectic shopping lives of moms even more by branching into the grocery category.

Quidsi launched the new category Monday via Soap.com with nearly 10,000 non-perishable items from top brands such as Cheerios, Kettle Chips, Celestial Seasonings tea, Eden Organic Foods, The Gluten-Free Pantry, Ener-G Foods, and more.  Shoppers can browse everything from cereal and pasta to baking ingredients, canned foods, coffee, tea, and so on.

“Our customers have been asking for food items since the day Soap launched in July 2010,” Soap.com’s Director of Marketing Teju Prabhakar told me.  “We've always wanted to expand our selection, and this is a natural extension of the items we already carry.”

The logic of focusing on non-perishable items is easy enough to understand—but with Quidsi’s renowned lightning-fast two-day shipping, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched to imagine the company managing perishable items, like produce.

“We don't currently have plans to carry perishable foods, simply because the logistics and delivery systems become much more complex - you need refrigerated trucks, and the inventory management is much different for items like bananas than it is for boxes of cereal,” said Prabhakar.  “That being said, we can't rule anything out.”

Of course, a number of grocery store chains are getting into the shipping side of things, so Soap.com won’t be the only one in the game, but carrying specialty items like gluten-free foods and organic products—which many stores don’t carry—will give Soap.com an attractive edge.

As always, the company offers two-day shipping—or same day shipping for customers living in Manhattan—and free shipping is available for all orders $39 or more.

Soap.com carries over 40,000 items shoppers would normally have to go to a pharmacy to buy—including health and beauty items, personal care, and household essentials. 

Last month, Quidsi, which was bought by Amazon last November for $545 million, launched its first online toy store—Yoyo.com, which carries 20,000 toys, books, games, and more.