There was another older service called HomeGrocer that was doing quite well... until WebVan bought them out and converted them to WebVan tech. From Wikipedia:

There was another older service called HomeGrocer that was doing quite well... until WebVan bought them out and converted them to WebVan tech. From Wikipedia: > In September 2000, stockholders approved a $1.2B all stock buyout by the cash-rich competitor Webvan of the much larger HomeGrocer.com. HomeGrocer was rebranded to Webvan, the management team fired and the technology and processes converted to Webvan. The Webvan technology did not work very well and their execution was poor. Most telling, the eight different HomeGrocer facilities converted to Webvan saw overnight sales declines of one-third, then over 50% within two weeks and never recovered. Formerly profitable HomeGrocer facilities quickly ended up with significant losses. Studies of what happened after the merger were not kind to the original Webvan management who spent over $500M before going bankrupt less than a year later.