Bed Bath & Beyond Expands Google Cloud Deal on Online Demand

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. BBBY has expanded its collaboration with Google Cloud, given the ongoing digital boom. In this regard, the company has signed a five-year deal with Google Cloud to keep up with its rival retailers, given the current scenario when consumers are largely shifting to digital purchases. The company’s initial partnership with Google Cloud dates back to 2017, which is likely to meet the increased demand during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday season sale. This move is guided by the sudden surge in demand for online products and wide adoption of Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store (BOPIS) and Curbside Pickup services by customers, thanks to the pandemic.

Notably, Bed Bath & Beyond has been witnessing solid digital sales growth since the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019. In the first quarter of fiscal 2020, digital sales rose roughly 82% with robust growth witnessed throughout the quarter. Further, digital sales surged more than 100% each in April and May. Moreover, online demand rose more than 80% in June even after stores reopened.

Coming back to the deal, Bed Bath & Beyond will be able to leverage Cloud technologies, including BigQuery, Spanner, Google Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine. This will, in turn, help in curating more personalized products and services, improving fulfillment capacity, better managing merchandise and enhancing demand prediction.

Retailers have access to a huge amount of data nowadays without any real-time processing. The company expects increased demand for the holiday seasons to add to the woes. That said, Google Cloud’s BigQuery will help Bed Bath & Beyond manage its data through machine learning and analytics, which in turn will provide it with better sales and demand projection along with aiding inventory management. Further, the company’s transformation to Google Cloud is likely to lower costs and contribute to supply chain and merchandising via real-time analytics.

We hope that this latest transaction will help it sustain the online momentum, thus contributing to the company’s top line in the near future. In the past three months, this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock has gained 29.4%, outperforming the industry’s growth of 16.2%.

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