Lockdowns spur online grocery buys
Most electronic supermarket consumers made their first online purchases in the pandemic, a survey by the Research Institute for Retail Consumer Goods (IELKA) and the Convert Group has found.
It found that 45% of e-consumers performed their first online buys last year and 21% this year. Just one in three, or 33%, had already started buying their groceries online before the lockdowns. It also found that 41% of e-supermarket customers shopped online at first due to measures restricting movement and 28% because of the fear for visiting a brick-and-mortar store.
Another 10% attributes its first forays into online grocery shopping to the long time spent at home – though those general rates are higher among those who only started using e-supermarkets in 2021.
Pre-pandemic reasons for choosing to shop on the internet rank lower, and mostly concern older buyers, dating from 2019: 21% cited difficulties in getting their shopping home, 18% referred to the lack of time and 13% shopped online mainly because of the lower prices available.
The average e-supermarket customer shops 16 times per year and the average monthly expenditure is 146 euros.
