Online Grocery Shopping: Identifying Change in Consumption Practices

Abstract

Following the invention and proliferation of the Internet, Web and mobile technologies, we have seen a global revolution in retailing. Despite the rapid growth of e-commerce, the online grocery shopping market has taken until now to gain traction, currently constituting 6.9% of the UK's grocery market, but projected to increase 68.3% to £17.6bn by 2021. There is little work accounting for new and contingent behaviours in the online grocery market, not least because of historically poor access to retailers' data. This paper leverages access to the UK's fourth largest supermarket, WM Morrisons Plc (Morrisons) to investigate consumer behaviour in this market, augmenting the Office for National Statistics' Living Costs and Food Survey, the UK's only substantial publicly available resource to date. This paper establishes that there have been changes in consumer behaviours in response to the unique opportunities and challenges of online grocery shopping and explores the specific socio-technical factors that may be contributing to these changes, namely: ease of price comparison; attitudes to purchasing perishable goods online; and logistical considerations. Furthermore, it provides some evidence that the proportion of fresh products bought online exceeds the proportion bought offline, contrary to popular belief. Finally, this paper argues that with correction for location bias, the Morrisons sample could provide a proxy for examining online grocery behaviour in-depth at the national level.

Food shopping under risk and uncertainty

“…Panic buying is always discussed within the context of developed world shopping practices. The history of food retailing is a one of increasing diversity of offer, and increasing certainty of choice ( Munson, Tiropanis, & Lowe, 2017 ; Stanton, 2018 ). These modern practices are at the end of a relatively short history of human development that saw the emergence of pastoralism and agriculture leading to innovations in human social organization ( Kaplan, Hooper, & Gurven, 2009 ).…”

“…But surveys like this are clearly blunt tools. Actual data on spending, and food choice would be extremely useful and may become available at some point after the pandemic (although some researchers note this is hard to access ( Munson et al, 2017 )). To really test the dynamic nature of our hypotheses we believe a combination of detailed observational data from similar, real pandemic situations, modelling and experimental work are required.…”

Technology Acceptance as a Determinant of Online Grocery Shopping Adoption

“…Consumer's behaviour has gradually changed in basket composition by product category with the continuous development of online grocery shopping in response to the unique opportunities and challenges of OGS. For example, online consumer's spend more on fresh products than offline, contrary to popular prejudice that customers are afraid of shop fresh products online (Munson et al, 2017).…”

“…OGS is at the forefront of companies and researchers interest now (Monsuwé et al, 2004;Kurnia and Chien, 2003;Munson et al, 2017;The New Retail Report, 2015). Understanding consumers' motivations and limitations to shop online are of a major importance for companies.…”

Online Grocery Shopping Acceptance: The Impact on the Perception of New Technologies and Loyalty in Retailing

“…Based on that, these hypotheses were formulated as: The differences between online and offline grocery shoppers have been explored from different perspectives. Some studies have focused on the differences in consumer behaviour of these groups (Munson et al, 2017;Harris, Riley, Riley, & Hand, 2017), while others have examined the perception of technology and innovation (Maat & Konings, 2018;Moliner-Velázquez et al, 2019) or on differences in loyalty (Saini & Lynch, 2016;Danaher et al, 2003). The research in this paper will focus on differences in the acceptance of new technologies and loyalty between online and offline grocery customers.…”