What’s the Future of Online Grocery Shopping?

Grocery delivery to our door is still relatively dinky, but ordering groceries online for pickup at the store took hold during the pandemic and is sticking. Maybe.

There’s been some backsliding on online ordering, however, and the vast majority of Americans are still shopping for groceries the old-fashioned way. It’s tough to assess whether and how much the online-grocery habit might stick.

A report by Forrester and IRI found that in many categories of products purchased in supermarkets, online growth is lower than it was in January 2020. In closely watched shopper surveys by the research firm Bricks Meets Clicks, online grocery sales have been growing unevenly recently.

It’s not a surprise that online grocery sales couldn’t keep increasing as quickly as they did when we were internet panic-shopping in 2020. But with the sales still relatively small, it’s not a sign of passionate digital love that the numbers haven’t been going up quickly or steadily. (Rising costs for everything also make it tricky to compare 2022 shopping with that in 2019.)

Even experts can’t confidently say how quickly Americans will adopt the online-grocery habit or how much of our shopping may wind up virtual. “The numbers are too small to draw permanent conclusions,” said Jason Goldberg, the chief commerce strategy officer at the advertising giant Publicis.

He told me that in his conversations with industry leaders, the big supermarket chains are betting that online grocery shopping will become a bigger part of our lives but that everyone is also constantly second-guessing their beliefs.

For now at least, supermarkets including Walmart, Target and Kroger are putting money into expanding options for people to pick up groceries that they purchased online. That has been Americans’ go-to method for digital grocery shopping.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/technology/online-grocery-shopping.html