By Tracey Hall ~
We are all living extremely busy lives these days. I have always found that one of the most time consuming household chores is food shopping. In any given week, two to three stops to pick something up is the norm. A list is always helpful if you remember to bring it with you. No sooner do I replenish one item, then another one is gone. And so it goes over and over.
I must not be the only one that feels this way. Smart stores are making it easier for us to shop for our food in the comfort of our own home. Online grocery purchases average 3.4% of total store sales for supermarkets offering the service, but the number jumped to 5.2% of total sales for those retailers who have had the service for at least 4 years according to the new Brick Meets Click Grocery Ecommerce Supermarket Scorecard Report.
These results show that ecommerce is becoming an important contributor to supermarket sales. This growth in supermarket ecommerce comes just as the online grocery battle between Amazon and Walmart is intensifying. “The good news is that supermarket ecommerce growth was happening even before Amazon announced their purchase of Whole Foods,” explains David Bishop, Partner at Brick Meets Click and lead author of the report, “and the rapid deployment of a number of different Walmart initiatives reveals that the company considers online grocery an important gateway to their ecommerce growth. The increased competition in grocery is not just putting pressure on supermarkets to get into ecommerce; it’s requiring that they be good at it, too.
Smaller grocery chains are also stepping up their game. It helps that we as consumers are getting more comfortable buying food online. The average size of supermarket online transactions $148 according to the recent Brick Meets Click research – shows that customers are comfortable buying a broad range of grocery products online; the average value of customer orders increased over the previous year by more than 5%.
What do you think of buying your food for the week online? Have you tried it and are you changing your shopping habits now? We’d love to hear your experiences!