Webvan
 |
|
| Industry | Online retailer |
|---|---|
| Fate | Bankrupt, resurrected by Amazon.com in 2009 |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Defunct | 2001 |
| Headquarters | Foster City, California |
| Products | Grocery |
|
Number of employees
|
3,500 at peak |
| Website | http://www.webvan.com |
Webvan was an online grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001 after 3 years of operation and was later folded into Amazon.com. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, United States, in Silicon Valley. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten US markets: San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Atlanta, Georgia, Sacramento, and Orange County, California. The company had hoped to expand to 26 cities by 2001.
CNET named Webvan one of the largest dot-com flops in history.
Webvan was founded in the heyday of the dot-com bubble in 1996 by Louis Borders, who also co-founded the Borders bookstore in 1971.
The company's investors pressured it to grow very fast to obtain first-mover advantage. This rapid growth was cited as one of the reasons for the downfall of the company.
Webvan placed a $1 billion order with engineering company Bechtel Corporation to build its warehouses, and bought a fleet of delivery trucks.
In 2000, Webvan bought HomeGrocer, a competitor that was also losing money, for $1.2 billion in stock.
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Wikipedia