Anyone remembering Webvan? Well, despite common wisdom, the brand is still alive, now owned and run by Amazon. And so is Online Grocery Shopping. A report recently published by Datamonitor touts it as the next star performer of online retailing:

The comparatively low percentage of the sales of online channels to the overall grocery industry has already captured wide interest in the industry trying to utilize consumers’ general experience of shopping online. Convenience is a major motivator of consumers’ interest in the online channel for sourcing groceries. It requires less physical effort and a more organized shop compared to the in-store experience.

This sound pretty much like the pitch of YourSmartCart.com, launched last week by two university students in South Carolina. YourSmartCart.com ships groceries through UPS, meaning that orders usually take 3-4 days to arrive. “We want to change the way people think about groceries,” says Benjamin Frear who founded the company together with Benjamin Ellison.

The founders cite a survey recently conducted by The Nielsen Company, according to which half of Americans hate grocery shopping or, at best, find it a chore. YourSmartCart.com promises to reduce the time consumers normally spend at the grocery store to five minutes of shopping on the website. The site currently offers more than 1,200 grocery items with weekly additions made based on customer feedback.

Another approach to the promised land of Online Grocery Shopping is taken by Chronodrive, a french online food retailer founded as early as 2002. Chronodrive dropped the home delivery while keeping the online ordering, thus saving the high costs of delivery that french consumers weren’t willing to pay. Consumers pick up their orders at Chronodrive outlets themselves instead.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the format is expected to reach a 4%-5% market share of grocery shopping by 2013, compared with 0.6% today. “People want to save time on grocery shopping,” says retail consultant Laurent Thoumine of Kurt Salmon Associates in Paris. “The drive-through offers a very original solution.”