Click & Collect Groceries

Click and Collect Groceries? That is the newest term in the grocery food business on how food is migrating to the online world. What does Click and Collect Groceries mean? Most online shopping works in this manner; you browse for products, put them in your shopping cart, select the delivery method and voila! A package arrives at your home.

Click and Collect Groceries are different, the supermarket has a website for you to order your groceries, place them in your shopping cart but the difference is you pick up your order at the grocery store.

Food many times is perishable and does not lend itself to inexpensive delivery methods such as UPS or FedEx ground services. Additionally food is not a high ticket item like home entertainment or computers and food can't support a heavy shipping charge: we just won't pay for it or see the value.

Research Farm, is an research firm specialized in the retail sector, published a study Online Grocery Retailing in the EU and the US.

Their research summary points out that "Click & collect was viewed by many as a hybrid model that was destined to become obsolete in a few years time.." but the grocery retailing industry is embracing it as their go to fulfillment model, at least for now. Consumers are time starved and see the convenience ordering online and having their order completed and ready for pick up, more often than not, on the way home from work.  Who wants to wait in a checkout line vs. clicking and picking! This model has convenience,  spontaneity through an e-commerce site and eliminates the unsustainable delivery costs prohibit online foods from attracting more customers.

The trend is growing in Europe with retailers such as Tesco, experimenting with their drive-thru click & collect program. In the Northeast Shoprite from Home is a program offered in a limited selection of

ShopRite Stores.

If you are a consumer this is a convenient way to avoid the weekly shopping experience (or lack thereof) although I see it more for staples and products you are already familiar with.

If you are a brand:

• Look at the hurdles and opportunities this may present for positioning your product to those retailers seeing this niche shopping channel as a potential mainstream form of shopping in the not too distant future.
• Follow some of the players such as ShopRite from Home and Tesco so you can speak their language when presenting your products. One Google search was chock full of recent information on Click & Collect and Online Grocery Shopping
• Recognize that retail grocers are driving this right now.  Competition in branded and private label foods brands will start to look at what they make and tweak the product and/or packaging to be more sustainable in this pre-order mode.
• Packaging will be a significant factor. I can envision larger pack sizes for certain brands, more efficient package sizes, essentially anything that can be re-engineered from a packaging standpoint to make it easier for the supermarket to pick the product, bundle it as a larger package to be picked up, and be able to "hang around" for a while until the consumer picks up the product later in the day. Anything that helps the retailer increase the order size is critical, that is where the larger package size comes in to play.
• The last point is particularly important if you make perishables.

What is the Downside to Click & Collect and Online Grocery Retailing?

Currently food brands have many opportunities to communicate attributes, benefits, promotions and price at the store level. That is called Shelf Strategy.  With Click & Collect shelf strategy goes away and communicating your brand now relies on Social Media and promotional options that the Click & Collect retailer provides. For new products Click & Collect is problematic since many new food products get initial consumer trial based on an impulse purchase in the store. In spite of the increasing use of a shopping list for the consumer, impulse purchases are still critical. Click & Collect is a paradigm shift in consumer foods. Are you ready?

As a consumer do you see a real value here or is this just a fad in your opinion? As a food brand what are your plans for being more competitive as Click & Collect and Online Grocery Retailing is rolled out over the next several years? Do you have an creative ideas?