Buying Groceries Online? Join the Very Big Crowd!

October 10, 2024 by

For those out there who have bought groceries online lately, you’re actually part of a much greater fraternity than a lot of people expected.

New reports from Kantar Worldpanel say that not only are online grocery sales growing at a staggering rate, they’re also growing much faster than their brick-and-mortar equivalents.

The Kantar Worldpanel report noted that the total worldwide sales proposition for “fast-moving consumer goods,” which generally includes groceries, grew at 1.6 percent in the last fiscal year.

For online grocers, meanwhile, that jumped up almost tenfold, to 15 percent growth. Online sales now comprise 4.4 percent of the entire market, which means $48 billion spent on online groceries worldwide.

By 2025, that number’s going to increase almost threefold, hitting about $150 billion worldwide and making up about nine percent of overall sales.

Even in the United States, that’s going to be readily apparent. Online grocery sales will rise 157 percent this year thanks to a host of new options in the field. Peapod, AmazonFresh, and a host of others are constantly getting in on the action, but what’s especially interesting is that the United States is a comparatively small part of the market.

South Korea, for example, holds 16.6 percent of the total market, followed by Japan at 7.2 percent and the UK rounding out the top three at 6.9 percent.

Geography likely has something to do with that; when you’re dealing with all the non-urban land mass the United States has, it’s hard to deliver groceries with any rapidity.

If your fulfillment center is in Indianapolis and someone places an order in Orland, you’d either better not be selling perishables or you’d better have a refrigerated delivery vehicle.

Still, it’s a noteworthy proposition, and one tailor-made for mobile payments. Every use a delivered meal would have could be just as worthwhile for delivered groceries; it’s just an unassembled meal. From beach picnics to tailgate cookouts, ordering groceries for delivery can be a serious profit-center.

Seeing these numbers poised for rise makes sense, and with mobile payment options included, the end result is one that’s likely to be supremely convenient for shoppers.

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