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Efforts in the electronic grocery shopping, i.e. e‐grocery business, focus especially on the physical distribution of the goods. For example, in the USA there are several e‐grocery service providers with various operating concepts and offering various service levels. The home delivery concept of Streamline is based on a reception box at the customer’s garage or home yard enabling unmanned reception. In contrast, WebVan has launched a home delivery concept where the customer can select a convenient half an hour delivery time window. Various service concepts have been implemented and offered, but has anyone really analysed the differences in cost structures of these two and of other concepts in between the two extremes? Investigates existing home delivery service concepts from different angles and presents concrete simulation results of various parameters representing several home delivery service levels. Eventually, identifying the parameters will give guidelines for the future development of the e‐grocery home delivery services.

The challenge faced by supplier companies in the grocery supply chain for implementing collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) is how to get the retailer to forecast, especially when it has not been necessary before. In this paper a solution that would allow collaboration on a wide scale is presented. The forecasting approach is called “rank and share” and uses input from the retailer’s existing planning process – the category management process. The benefit of using category management as the basis is that the retailer can scale up collaboration with a large number of suppliers without increasing planning resources. For the supplier the benefit is point of sales forecasts at the time of the assortment decision. To support this collaborative forecasting process there is a need for more robust replenishment solutions, new measures to illustrate benefits, and for a distributed planning architecture and software. Potential solutions for these are also discussed in the paper.

Home delivery of groceries is not yet a very popular service among consumers. One reason for the slow progress has been the time‐consuming and expensive ordering process. In recent years, Internet‐based solutions have solved most of the problems related to the order transaction process – making ordering simpler, cheaper and faster. However, there are still a lot of unsolved problems in the e‐grocery business. One of the biggest obstacles is inefficient home delivery. This paper examines how different solutions for goods receipt affect home‐delivery efficiency. Different alternatives for receiving the goods are presented and the service levels of these concepts are described from the consumer’s point of view. In addition, the costs for the e‐grocer are studied. The efficiency of using a reception box is demonstrated by simulating two alternative receiving concepts.