Ain't progress grand? You just ordered $100 worth of groceries from your favorite online grocer -- without leaving your desk. Talk about convenient. Unfortunately, by the time you get home, the rum raisin will be trickling down the porch steps.

Enter David Porter. The Kansas City (Mo.) entrepreneur sensed opportunity in the specter of gooey puddles -- and a major flaw in the much-ballyhooed online grocery concept: Nobody's home to take deliveries anymore. His solution: A collapsible high-tech container hung outside your house called the Smart Box. You program it to heat some compartments, cool others, and freeze still others. The delivery person punches in an access number and distributes the groceries to the appropriate compartments. Smart Box then E-mails you when that's done. It's even rigged with an alarm system -- lest someone try to steal your lamb chops.

The Smart Box sounds like something out of Woody Allen's futuristic comedy Sleeper. Designed jointly by Porter and the nonprofit Kansas City-based Midwest Research Institute, it's still in prototype. It doesn't even have a distributor. Porter's onto a real problem, though. Before online groceries and other Net-based delivery services can take off, they'll have to devise delivery solutions.

Smart Box isn't a thing of beauty: It looks like a garment bag that rolls up into a mailbox. That's not so surprising. Porter began thinking creatively about delivery logistics while running his $600,000-a-year dry cleaning business. Since many of his Garment Care Inc. customers weren't home to pick up or drop off clothes during the day, he wanted to serve them at work. The owners and managers of their downtown offices frowned upon drivers prowling the floors for clothing pickups. So Porter installed drop boxes in the lobbies or parking lots of four Kansas City office buildings. Customers leave their clothes in the boxes. Garment Care then delivers the clean clothes to a closet on each floor. Building owners agreed to this for a 3% cut of sales, then later did it for free, Porter says, because it was an easy way to offer tenants more services. That experience has Porter convinced that big national online grocers will offer Smart Boxes -- which will probably cost between $300 and $400 -- free to customers to boost sales.

Consumers seem to like the concept. Midwest Research Institute polled 800 households on their attitudes toward Smart Box in late 1996. Ninety-two percent said they'd use it at least once a month for groceries. Eighty-five percent said they would use it for take-out meals, and slightly more than three-quarters said they would use it for dry cleaning.

Porter isn't the only one looking for commercially viable solutions to the delivery problem. A Forrester Research study from late last year predicts consumer spending on the Web will grow to $108 billion in 2003 from $18 billion this year. A 1999 Forrester study found that online businesses expect orders to increase nearly 1,000% in the next two years.

A key question: How much technology is needed for consumers to get their ice cream? For Porter's E-mail notification to work, vendors would require access numbers the device could recognize. He also envisions a central tracking system to record pickups and drop-offs to the boxes.

Steven Johnson, co-director of E-commerce programs for Andersen Consulting in Chicago thinks Smart Box is much too complex: "It strikes me like killing flies with sledgehammers. It's kind of over the top." It would make a lot more sense to get gas stations, convenience stores, and other local businesses to accept deliveries for local residents, Johnson contends. Andersen Consulting even foresees a relatively low-tech solution: Local grocers taking orders for dry goods online and packaging them for rapid pickup. Then consumers would run in for perishables, cutting their shopping time.

That makes little sense to those online grocers who cater primarily to wealthy customers, for whom convenience is everything. Some companies are building their own systems for delivering when no one's home. Streamline Inc. in Westwood, Mass., which delivers groceries, videos, and dry cleaning, was among the first to tackle the problem. "[Consumers] say to us, 'Guys, if I have to go to the store in order to get cream, I might as well get everything else,'" says Chief Executive Officer Tim DeMello. Streamline installs refrigerators -- with attached dry goods compartments -- and security keypads in its customers' garages, and builds the cost into a $30-a-month delivery.

DeMello thinks Smart Box is an intriguing idea but that the device's appearance could be a hindrance. Streamline, which went public in June, 1999, has been working with General Electric, one of its investors, to develop a delivery box as well. Streamline has tested some exterior boxes in focus groups with limited success. "When you are dealing with an exterior unit...people don't want to have this big thing hanging off the home," he says.

Some online companies aren't as intent on solving the unattended delivery dilemma. That's because they see a delivery as an opportunity to gather market intelligence about their customers. Shoplink, a Streamline competitor also based in Westwood, Mass., builds comprehensive customer profiles and requires its drivers to note signs of change in their customers' lives. Acquire a pet or have a baby, and pretty soon you'll be receiving friendly promotions for pet food or baby food.

CEO John Icke brushed off Porter when he approached him about a Smart Box deal: "I think it looks ugly," he says. His wealthy, suburban clients wouldn't tolerate the devices: "We have people who have million-dollar homes."

To really make headway with the current Smart Box concept, Porter would need cooperation from the big package-delivery companies that will be making many of the Internet deliveries. RPS Inc., owned by Federal Express' parent company, has been testing a new residential service that includes nighttime and weekend drop-offs, and uses an advanced route-plotting system. "We see that the business is moving toward the Web," says Bram Johnson, RPS's vice-president for marketing in Pittsburgh. "Our interest has been to try to develop a channel to satisfy the need and develop some new markets." He says Smart Box is a "silly" idea because it can't handle heavy goods: "What if I have three boxes or a television set?" UPS, in a pre-IPO quiet period, wouldn't comment for the story.

Is Porter just ahead of his time? Maybe, but given how much attention E-tailers are devoting to making their sites attractive, his time may be approaching fast.

By Jeremy Quittner in New York
jeremy_quittner@businessweek.com

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