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."
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Shopper Marketing - January 2016
