If you’ve watched the news in the past 24 hours you can hardly have missed the potential Sainsbury’s Asda merger. In an audacious £10 billion bid, the combined company would propel the 2nd and 3rd largest UK supermarkets ahead Tesco which would lose it’s crown as the UK’s biggest grocer.
“J Sainsbury plc (“Sainsbury’s”) notes the speculation concerning a possible combination with Asda Group Limited (“Asda”). Sainsbury’s confirms that it and Walmart Inc. are in advanced discussions regarding a combination of the Sainsbury’s and Asda businesses. A further announcement will be made at 7am on Monday 30 April.”
– Sainsbury’s statement regarding media speculation
There are any number of twists and turns if this merger goes ahead, but the two most obvious for the marketplace world would benefit eBay and Walmart.
Sainsbury’s Asda merger and marketplaces
eBay could potentially be gifted another 600 odd Asda store locations for Click & Collect to add to their circa 1016 current Click & Collect locations. It would appear likely that the new group would be keen to roll out Argos into Asda stores to increase their range of electrical and home goods and along with Argos comes eBay collections.
Walmart it would appear want to retail a sizeable holding in the new combined company and one longer term benefit from this relationship is the potential to launch a marketplace in the UK. Currently, Walmart have pretty much ignored Asda although the Walmart marketplace in the US goes head to head with Amazon. This could be for any number of reasons including Asda’s online shopping profile not having sufficient market penetration and the diversity of goods that Asda offers being too small. This could all change with the addition of Argos’ huge inventory of electrical, home and garden products, combined with Asda’s George label and chuck in a media supplier, which both Sainsbury’s, Argos and Asda already have, and there’s a range of products in the combined business that could form the basis of a marketplace big enough to attract third party retailers to sign up.
The big rival Tesco have dragged their feet with a closed marketplace and publicly to merchants don’t appear to fully defined their strategy. Certainly with just a few hundred retailers signed up to sell on Tesco (compared to eBay’s declared 200,000 professional sellers) it’s still a minnow in the marketplace world. Would a combined Sainsbury’s & Asda with Walmart’s experience and expertise have the appetite to open a marketplace? Only time will tell.
8 Responses
they will be so consumed with worry over amazon nicking their grocery sales , ebay s click and collect will be the last thing on the list
many supermarkets seem to do their very best to keep buyers out of store
with on line purchase and home delivery
its more click and deliver, rather than click and collect
amazon out class them all at doing just that
Yes please we need a 3rd marketplace to break the duopoly.
Jet.com in the UK?
“Would a combined Sainsbury’s & Asda with Walmart’s experience and expertise have the appetite to open a marketplace? ”
That would be interesting, and Walmart is one of the few companies with the money to actually take on Amazon and eBay.
The UK really could do with a new player with a bit of clout, the big two really do lack any real competition and have been really taking advantage of it in the last two years.
taking on amazon directly
will probably not happen,
not enough of the cake left to warrant the cost , their effort seems to be in protecting what they have hence the merger
I got so fed up with click and collect as Sainsbury’s specifically were loosing about 3 out of 10 parcels. It would take at least 2-3 days to resolve each one with my buyers going into the store on several occasions to resolve each issue. These were not small boxes either….
I turned it off towards the end of the year as it became such a pain. It seemed to only occur in stores that also had a DPD pickup shop – we used DPD at that time and I think it was the staff in-store getting confused. eBay ended up refunding us a ton of money.
We’ve changed couriers now, but I’ve still not quite got over it enough to turn it back on just yet! 😉