E-COMMERCE

SECTION ONE

SECTION TWO

Click on the LinkedIn logo to join the new Shopper Technology Institute Discussion Group

SECTION THREE

eCommerce CDTs Show Brands Are More Important

To Online Grocery Shoppers

By Paul Weitzel

 

2022 was the magic year when online grocery sales were forecasted to reach 10 percent of brick-and-mortar store sales. Well, in some of the most established brick-and-click operations, the 10 percent milestone has already been achieved. That’s correct!  In some stores, brick-and-click sales are now 10 percent of brick-and-mortar sales. While most new brick-and-click programs are seeing online sales averaging 2 percent to 4 percent of brick-and-mortar sales, well-run programs in strong eCommerce markets are growing and reaching key volume thresholds that suggest eCommerce is very real and, more importantly, sustainable.

Our recent online sales data from eCommerce grocers show the growth trend line on track to reach the $25 billion forecasted mark by 2022. Several programs are now poised to steal significant and game-changing sales shares from those operators who lag in this growth space.

Big Brands Are Winning Online

And the big brands are winning, too! We recently completed a fresh round of CDT (Consumer Decision Tree) work across several key center-store categories to understand how consumers are shopping online. We looked at brick-and-mortar baskets and brick-and-click baskets for retail stores offering online shopping. We found the brand attribute moving higher up on the consumer’s purchase decision criteria for online shoppers compared to in-store shoppers. For those of you who use CDTs, you know this suggests brands are more important than other product attributes to online shoppers as compared to brick-and-mortar shoppers.

We attribute this shift to several factors:

• Many online shoppers prefer to find items using a search engine rather than scrolling through pages and pages of product. Shoppers generally know what they are looking for and there is less browsing and therefore less shopping online.
  

• There is an increasing use of the auto-replenish feature (selecting items from previous baskets) when available to make the shopping experience easier. This is helping brand loyalty.
  

• Early adopters are less price sensitive online.
  

So, online shoppers are more often looking for specific brands when ordering, even more so than inside a brick-and-mortar store. If you’re a brand that makes it into the online shopping list, you are going to do well in the eCommerce world.  If you are not on the e-list, you are going to be shut out of the growth.

This plays out in spades at Chewy.com, one of the leading pure-play e-tailers. Chewy is a dream world for leading brands of pet food and supplies. Much of their business is auto-replenish and auto-reorder. This means consumers are reordering the same SKUs every time and the reordering is done automatically (timed). Consumers enjoy significant savings from these two programs. Chewy gets a very loyal customer, more efficient orders, and better inventory forecasts.

We do see new technologies like virtual shopping (digital shelf) making their way to eCommerce platforms. They will have an impact on how consumers shop online. We don’t know yet what the adoption curve will look like. A lot will depend on the overall experience shopping from a virtual shelf. If virtual shopping becomes an accepted tool, then we are likely to see more browsing and more shopping. However, it is still more likely that features that make reordering easy, like auto-replenish, will still be used by many. This helps brand loyalty.

It’s not uncommon today for key grocery categories to index 130 online compared to brick-and- mortar sales, and it’s not uncommon for key brands to outperform this index. When you combine the fact that retailers are experiencing significant incrementality with their online business, you can begin to sense how eCommerce can really benefit brands that know how to win in this space.

CDTs Can Address Assortment and Decisions

While CDTs are used heavily to help develop a more shopper-friendly shelf layout in stores, they can also be used to design a better layout for the pages of products online. Knowing which product attributes are more important or less important to consumers when shopping online can help create better groupings of product on web pages. Better groupings will make shopping easier and improve the online experience for those consumers who browse.

In addition to improving page layouts, CDTs can help rationalize online assortment. CDT work produces incrementality and important substitutability scores that can help define more optimal assortment ranges. Most grocers today want to make every item that is available in the store, available online. As programs mature, rationalizing assortment and creating a more efficient pick-and-pack operation will be required to make money at eCommerce. Having efficient assortment will be a critical component to creating a sustainable program.

More to Come

We’ve only scratched the surface with understanding online shopping behavior. E-commerce platforms are improving every day. New capabilities will allow e-tailers and their trading partners to leverage personal pricing, personal shopping and other new features that will transform the way we shop for groceries and how we evaluate the overall online experience.  At some point, the experience will begin to be valued as much or even more than the products themselves. E-tailers will be judged on a whole new shopper value equation and the importance of brands will likely shift.

It will increasingly be important for CPG manufacturers to work with their eCommerce partners to begin elevating content, improve messaging, and providing the right packaging. Expect more video content, more video recipes and other interaction tools to improve online shopping experiences. Personalizing pages to individual households will emerge to better connect the right brands with the online path-to-purchase.

Speed Is Life?

If you have not developed an eCommerce growth strategy, you are already behind. If you are not sure if you should develop one, well, you will probably find fewer growth opportunities in the years ahead. If this is not your number one priority, it should be a close second.

Grocers are already beginning to map out center store reinvention strategies as they begin to look to rebalance retail space to meet this emerging need. New operating practices will emerge, and new business practices will impact trading partner relationships. The best operators see it and they know it’s coming fast. The best CPGs see brand equity elevating online, and they are tapping into this immediate opportunity. Online shopping will continue to revolutionize how consumers purchase and receive goods. Leveraging actionable CDT insights is a critical first step to developing a good online strategy.

E-commerce is the speed of life.  Are you truly ready?

Paul Weitzel leads efforts in developing product solutions that improve in-store, online and supply chain decisions at Inmar. For more information: https://bit.ly/2qsO5hu.