Survey: Grocers have opportunity to shape consumers’ digital habits
Traditional grocers can still become part of the online migration, as consumer habits continue to evolve toward online shopping.
Online grocery penetration in the U.S., which currently stands at a mere 3 percent, is expected to at least triple in the next decade, according to a survey of more than 8,000 U.S. grocery shoppers by Bain & Co. and Google. One of the reasons for today’s small penetration rate is frequency. While 25 percent of consumers surveyed said they used an online grocery service in the last year, only 26 percent of those users — or 6 percent of all consumers — they have been placing online orders more than once a month.
The findings of the “Omnichannel Grocery is Open for Business – and Ready to Grow” survey suggest that obtaining repeat business is crucial to omnichannel grocery success. Among online grocery shoppers who say they have shopped online for groceries just once in the past 12 months, 42 percent report that the online experience saved them time. Sixty-three percent of online grocery shoppers who have shopped for groceries online three times said that online grocery shopping saved them time compared to an in-store trip, a 50 percent increase from those who have shopped online once.
“Online grocery shopping in the U.S. trails that of other e-commerce categories in large part because our grocery shopping habits are so deeply ingrained, and online grocery retailers haven’t yet convinced customers that grocery shopping online can be a better experience,” said Stephen Caine, a partner in the Bain & Company’s Retail practice. “Traditional grocers have decades of experience optimizing their physical stores to align with how shoppers think – training them to navigate store shelves to easily find what they are looking for, making it easy for them to make trade-offs between products, and providing inspiration when they want to try something new. Online grocery shopping has not yet found a way to digitally replicate these cues simply and intuitively.”
To read the survey results, click here.