Survey: Close to half of grocery shoppers use omnichannel services

Data confirms that grocery orders which start online often end in a brick-and-mortar store.

According to a recent survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers from digital recipe network Chicory, 46% of respondents indicated that they pick up their grocery order in the store after adding items to their digital carts. In addition, 44% of respondents use home grocery delivery. 

Almost four in 10 respondents (39%) either go to the store to physically shop for the items that they add into their digital carts or convert the digital cart into an actual shopping list.

Looking at discovery trends, the survey found that over half (56%) of respondents discover new grocery products online directly through a retailer's e-commerce site. Three in 10 (31%) respondents find new products on digital recipe sites, while 27% use digital circular and coupon services and websites to find new products and 21% find new products through digital ads.

Various social media channels, including Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest and Instagram (excluding TikTok, 11%) are nearly even in the percentage of respondents using them for grocery product discovery, with an average of 20%.

When asked to select all meal inspiration sources that apply, overall respondents chose food blogs (38%) as the top source for meal inspiration, followed by large recipe publishers (35%) and Pinterest (34%). An average of 19% of respondents have digital-first habits, such as saving recipes on social media and adding ingredients to digital shopping carts.

When asked to order likelihood of purchasing advertised or promoted products, respondents answered that ads in digital recipes (3.23 weighted average on a one-to-five-point scale) are the top context to get shoppers to buy products, slightly surpassing ads on retailer's websites (3.22). This is closely followed by shoppable tech (3.14), like a “buy ingredients” button in a digital recipe, outweighing both an ad on a coupon/circular website and an ad on social media.

In addition, 85% of respondents are likely to buy the same things weekly and 80% are likely to repeat previous grocery shopping orders. The likelihood of repeating prior purchases increases by 12% as household size increases from one- to two-person households to six-plus person households, and buying the same things weekly increases by 25%.