Global Grocer: international shoppers click and buy from fledgling online food sellers.

Jacqueline Cubici-Gonzalez, a self-professed Interact shopping addict, visits a grocery store Web site once a week to buy meat, vegetables, canned goods and toiletries. But she doesn't have the items delivered to her home in Camberley, England. She sends them instead to her mother's home in Maracay, Venezuela, through the Web site of the Venezuelan grocery store El Plazas, ElPlazas.com.

"I used to send her money, but this way I have more control," says Cubici-Gonzalez, a Venezuelan who has lived in England for 14 years. "Knowing my mother, I had the feeling that when I sent her money, she would run out and not have everything she needed in the fridge."

Cubici-Gonzalez is part of a growing number of people outside Latin America using the Internet to send groceries to relatives in the region. It's an alternative to sending money that customers like because it lets them avoid fees charged by money-wiring services and ensures that their money is spent on food. And, at a time when many countries in the region are dealing with severe economic downturns, Latin Americans living abroad feel a great need to support family members in their home countries.

>From El Plazas in Venezuela to Peru's E. Wong, grocery stores throughout Latin America now accept Web orders paid with foreign credit cards. Argentina's Disco Virtual began offering service to foreign customers in March 2003, and Mexico's Gigante plans to begin in the first half of 2004. "I have clients from London, Spain, China, Japan," says Maria Teresa Mendez, e-commerce manager for El Plazas. The chain saw its overseas orders increase from virtually none to 6% of Web sales after Venezuela's political instability led to a recession in late 2002.

Disco Virtual, at discovirtual.com.ar, has about 1,500 foreign customers, says the Web site's director, Diego Baron. The store's marketing campaign targets Argentines living abroad by advertising in cities such as Miami, Madrid and Barcelona, where many Argentines have moved in the past three years following the country's debilitating financial crisis. The grocery store also advertises on Web sites that expatriates visit, such as Argentine newspaper sites.

Instead of just groceries, Disco Virtual also offers gift certificates for use in the grocery store. "People don't necessarily know what sort of food their relatives need, so they prefer to buy them vouchers," Baron says. "That way, they know they're not buying clothes."

Baron says he sees the overseas purchases as a niche market with significant growth potential. Web sales account for a small percentage of most grocery companies' annual revenues, and purchases by foreign customers are just a fraction of those Web sales. But companies are continuing to tap the foreign market, in part because Web sales within the region have been somewhat disappointing.

In theory, online grocery delivery businesses should fare better in Latin America than they did in the United States, where many flopped with the dot.com bust, perhaps for being overly ambitious. Many of the U.S. start-ups had no brick-and-mortar stores, counting solely on elaborate warehouses with fleets of delivery vehicles and an army of workers that proved too costly to maintain. In Latin American cities, labor is cheaper, distances are shorter than in U.S. suburbs, and the stores use existing in-store staff to fill Web orders.

Yet in Latin America there are not enough Internet users to support these businesses. And those who do use the Internet don't yet feel completely comfortable buying over the Web. "People in Mexico are afraid to give their credit card number online," says Ernesto Valdez, vice president of the Mexican Internet Association (AMIPCI). "We are working on a marketing campaign, educating people so that they understand that buying on the Internet is safe, that there is technology that protects credit card information."

Another problem for Web-based grocery stores in Latin America is demographics. The group of people using the Internet in the region is not the same segment of the population that does the grocery shopping. About 65% of Mexico's 10 million Internet users are between the ages of 18 and 34, and about 68% are men, according to a 2003 AMIPCI study.

Most grocery store shopping, meanwhile, is done by middle-aged or elderly women, says Carlos Gonzalez, e-commerce director at Gigante, whose Web grocery service has not made a profit since it started in 2001. But Gonzalez says he's willing to wait for his customers to come.

"Right now, the young Internet users are living at home with their parents," he says. "But as these new generations get married and have their own homes, Internet grocery shopping is going to Increase."

Some busy professionals in Latin America, however, do take advantage of Internet grocery sites. Yanina Pineda, 31, works for a technology company in Mexico City. She orders groceries online front work and has them delivered to her office once a week. "I work all week, and on the weekends I don't feel like going to the supermarket," she says.

And although she doesn't order fruits and vegetables because she likes to select those items herself, she finds the service convenient. Most Web-based grocery delivery services in Latin America, along with the older telephone-order services, charge a small delivery fee, about US$2, which is sometimes waived for orders above a certain amount, around $40, depending on the store.

As Latin American grocery stores wait for more domestic Web customers like Pineda, they're tapping the potential of overseas clients like Cubici-Gonzalez.

"I just couldn't believe that I can sit here in my house and buy groceries for my mom's house in Venezuela," says Cubici-Gonzalez, whose mother is an unemployed widow. "We Latin Americans have a completely different culture than people in other places. We don't abandon old people; we look after them. My mother gave me a lot of her life, and I feel a need from my heart to help her."