Advances in eGrocery have led to greater competition. Since many brands offer online shopping, there is now even greater transparency in pricing. Shoppers can easily compare the prices of grocery products from each of their favorite stores. This can lead to price elasticity in some cases and is an area that brands should focus more on.
As consumers make fewer trips to physical grocery stores, the use of delivery services has increased. According to respondents, 44% said they use more services and applications from restaurants, meal kits or grocery delivery. Among grocery delivery apps, the most popular are Amazon Fresh (31%), Walmart Delivery (25%) and Instacart (24%). Taking into account the convenience factor, 27% of respondents said they plan to continue using grocery delivery apps once the pandemic ends and life returns to normal.
These new categories attract new customer segments, increase the average value of orders and allow deliveries to be stacked to help maximize the efficiency of each shipment. Deliverers must complete a certain number of deliveries per hour for the economy to be favorable to them. To limit contact, many are taking precautions, such as ordering food through delivery apps or making fewer trips to the supermarket. This study investigates how COVID-19 reshapes grocery shopping modes (GS), physical purchases (PGS) and online grocery shopping (OGS), by conducting an online survey that includes questions related to socioeconomic characteristics, GS options and reasons before, during and in the short and long term after COVID-19, as well as adoptive attitudes towards automatic delivery services.
Increasing total sales through home delivery may seem like a smart way to dilute fixed costs, but restaurants that focus too much on increasing deliveries could cannibalize their in-house meals and compromise the quality of the dining experience, which could eventually reduce the base on which their fixed costs are distributed. Rappi, based in Bogotá (Colombia), is an example of a multivertical delivery application that combines food delivery with other orders (through services such as RappiFavor or RappiCash), while Uber Eats and DoorDash have begun to explore the possibility of stacking orders as part of their food offerings. Barring these changes, pay-per-delivery is likely to continue to decline in real terms as platforms become more efficient and facilitate more total deliveries per hour.