How Have Customer Expectations For Grocery Delivery Services Changed Over Time?

Grocery apps boldly go where no digital brand has gone before, promising shopping experiences at an unparalleled level. If a fast food company didn’t deliver food from a restaurant quickly enough, the restaurant turned to another company that did, which meant that the delivery itself became more efficient. The Capgemini study revealed that retailers currently charge customers only 80% of the total cost of grocery delivery, and deliveries are now the most expensive part of the supply chain for those retailers. Walmart has been so successful with its delivery platform, Spark Driver, which offers the service to other companies with delivery needs.

Kroger also teamed up with autonomous vehicle company Nuro to test food delivery in an unmanned road vehicle that can go only from the supermarket to a customer’s home. 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. Courier networks also offer on-time or same-day delivery as a rule. 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.

A study conducted in five countries reveals that fast home delivery of food could make consumers more loyal to the grocery stores that offer them. But how high are the expectations of American delivery customers? Read on to find out what standards consumers had for courier companies in this expanding space. Deliverers must complete a certain number of deliveries per hour for the economy to be favorable to them. At the same time, customers were consulting customer reviews on home delivery apps, such as Just Eat and Uber Eats, which meant that delivery companies became extensions of the restaurants themselves.

Delivery platforms will need to develop how they harness customer data to improve the user experience and find innovative ways to reduce the costs associated with delivery. 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. 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.

Scroll to Top