How to make online grocery better for shoppers
Online grocery is BOOMING! That’s what we’re hearing all over the globe. Online grocery has doubled its share of the market in a year. But even in a market like the UK — one of the more advanced for online grocery — the total numbers are still small. For Tesco, online sales for the full year 2020/21 grew to account for 15% of total grocery sales. And all it took was a pandemic where literally going to a shop was risking your life. Fifteen per cent!
All this bearing in mind Tesco is a leader in the online grocery space. For the whole UK over December (when in full pandemic lockdown), digital orders accounted for 12.6% of grocery spend according to Kantar.
It’s a big increase, but off a small base. So is online grocery going to continue growing at speed? Or will we fall back post-pandemic? In one poll, 50% of online grocery shoppers will be sticking with it, and the other 50% will be reducing or stopping online grocery shopping entirely.
50% retention isn’t gold star.
I believe that the barriers to online grocery success are not predominantly logistical or even profitability reasons. Our experience shows it’s from a lack of understanding of the shopper.
The user experience for online grocery shopping is bad. Online grocery is not centered around the shopper.
The front end is bad. It’s difficult to use and creates cognitive dissonance. You see products at different angles than you’re used to, put together with no context for size, value for money, options to compare to and that’s if you can find your way through the many-click hierarchies.
In summary, this article is going to look at:
- The images are bad and the lack of context is bad
- The hierarchies are bad
- What we’re going to do about it
The images are bad and the lack of context is bad — Thumbnails vs Shelves
Thumbnail images are a weird way to shop for food.
Shoppers need to understand products easily — size plays a big part in that. 60% of shoppers put “good value for money” at the top of their priority list. If a shopper can’t easily discern whether the product is big, small, or one of the many variations in between, they’re not likely to have a good shopping experience with you.
The Twitter-sphere is alive with examples of this. Simply searching for “accidentally ordered” and “kilos of” provides you with all the source material you’ll need for the above. Some favourites? Go on then:
- Accidentally ordered a block of cheese the size of an arm
- Accidentally ordered 4Kg of sugar cubes
- Accidentally ordered 40Kg of flour
- Accidentally ordered 30lbs of potatoes
- Accidentally ordered 2lbs of garlic instead of 2 bulbs
My personal favourite respondent to one of our Virtual Store Trials projects was vociferous in her desire for the 3Kg tub of a stain removal powder to be returned to shelves. Except there’s never been a 3Kg tub of stain removal powder according to the brand we were working with. My point is that humans are bad with text, memory and simple information.
A lot has been done in the world of mobile-ready hero online images to help shoppers. Essentially, taking the product image and making it clearer to shoppers online. The three key pieces of information to convey; brand, flavour / scent / variant and size.
Some of these work well, some of these do not work well. Let’s take this Radox shower gel example below. On the left; the in-store product. The middle; a full product view of an online product image. The right; the “clearer” online product view. The right hand side which will result in, as proven above, what is 250ml? Do I need 10 of them?
The issue here is that if the product packaging needs to be clearer online, it needs to be clearer in-store as well. Conveying brand and variance needs to be done quickly and easily. The weight and size are all about the context of the shelf-view and surrounding products.
With a contextual shelf-view, shoppers can see and assess the sizes of products with their competitors. Things like sizing are lost when just looking at a single product in isolation, not when compared to other products.
The hierarchies are bad — Lists vs Store Maps
Fewer clicks are better. Having to click into a list for “Beverages”, then “Coffee”, then “Granules”, then realise the product you’re looking for is not in “Granules”, click out of “Granules”, click into something else, click into “buy-a-larger-bottle-of-whisky-to-dull-the-pain-of-online-shopping”.
Hierarchies are important and should mirror store merchandising hierarchies or store maps. We’re visual, so rather than text, we can do better with store maps and drill-downs. Seeing full shelves rather than individual minute groups of products makes products easier to find, proposes more options and variety and improves the shopping experience.
On top of this, being able to personalize these shelves to the individual shopper, in the way that they want to see it; that is the future of online grocery.
So here’s our solution.
Online grocery shopping needs a better front-end. It’s hierarchies / mapping and visuals. Getting shoppers in an environment they are familiar with is important. We believe that this is the key to making online grocery sticky for shoppers. The first retailer that goes big, will be the one that wins with shoppers.
Once this has been piloted, the exciting stuff comes into play; recommendations, healthier swaps, advice from experts, testing different layouts, more personalization.
We’ve spent the last 4 years analyzing how shoppers shop in front of virtual shelves that mimic the real world. Now we’re taking it online. We’re looking to partner with forward-thinking retailers that want to experiment with the future of retail. Get in touch with me (nick@storetrials.com) or any member of the team for a chat.
