Shopper Marketing - January 2016 - 76
REPORT: E-COMMERCE SYMPOSIUM That's one of the more noteworthy findings from Willard Bishop Consulting's recent "eCommerce SuperStudy." And it's a positive sign for a retail channel that consistently has been losing market share to a steady stream of competitors. At the moment, only 2.3% of "core" brickand-mortar supermarket shoppers (the top one-third of channel spenders) have added e-commerce to their routine, according to the study. But those who have are already doing about one-third of their total spending online, according to Willard Bishop managing partner Paul Weitzel. Order fulfillment options currently present an interesting (but not unintuitive) dichotomy: Shoppers who utilize curbside pick-up at the store skew toward "soccer moms with two kids in the backseat," while those who opt for home delivery tend to be older, Weitzel said. This contrast also is reflected in the items purchased: diapers over-index among pickup orders, while incontinence products are more prevalent with home deliveries. These early e-commerce shoppers are spending a lot more than their brick-andmortar counterparts ($141 versus $102 per receipt), which primarily illustrates the fact that 90% of e-commerce orders are stock-up trips - versus just 15% of trips to physical stores. But similar to the brick-and-mortar environment, online shoppers are "visiting" the entire store, hitting about 20 to 25 categories per trip and freely buying frozen foods and produce. In fact, the 15 most-shopped categories are the same online and off, Weitzel noted. Shopping online also doesn't seem to be broadening shopper purchase horizons, ei76 y SHOPPER MARKETING JANUARY 2016 ther: Fewer than half of the available SKUs are driving 95% of online sales. Contrary to what may have been projected for the industry, "It will not be the long tail" of product inventory that drives e-commerce success, he said. One significant area of the store that is showing a difference is health & beauty, which is under-indexing for online sales - probably because mass merchants have gained such a price and perception advantage in those categories, Weitzel suggested. On the flip side, package sizes - typically a strength of competing channels - are skewing larger (a trend also noted by ShopRite's Cheryl Williams). Although Willard Bishop's annual study covers only four grocers, it represents an analysis of 194 million online and offline transactions over the course of one year. - Peter Breen Understand and Consider the 'Things' S tephen Smith, a managing vice president at Gartner Research, threw some futuristic perspective into the mix by declaring that e-commerce is a "critical step [but] not the endgame" of "digital business," the unification of information, mobile, social and cloud activity that will let companies reach new levels of customer engagement by "blurring the digital and physical worlds." By 2020, there will be 7.3 billion personal devices in the world but 30 billion Internetenabled "things" that companies, and therefore marketers, will need to understand and consider. "The bigger 'customer' set is actually going to be all of the things," Smith said. "This is a different world that we're going to face."
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