With Amazon expanding its home delivery options through things like Dash buttons, and
I took a look at the top 5 US grocery retailers, according to Progressive Grocer, a trade publication focused on that retail vertical. If their current websites are any indication, traditional grocers are actually evolving their eCommerce sites to better sell online. Some retailers still are not actually selling anything other than deli orders, but with store assortments moving online, the gap between having a website and selling through that website appears to finally be narrowing.
Publix (#5)
Publix is a regional grocer based in Florida and operating approximately 1,100 stores across Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The company made $30.6 billion in retail sales in 2014, of which a miniscule amount came from their eCommerce site. Why? Because Publix does enable special orders through its site for deli and bakery, but does not currently sell groceries online.
However, the company does have a significant portion of its product assortment listed online. Just not for purchase. Until that day comes, the retailer has built a smartphone app which can be integrated with the online site so that shoppers can create a shopping list through the desktop experience, and have it sync with the phone for in-store access to that list. You can also use recipes to "instantly" add the ingredients to the shopping ist.
When it comes to that assortment, however, the catalog capabilities are very basic.
You can filter by brand, and a definite plus is to be able to filter by nutritional values. The product detail page contains the basics of description and nutrition information, as well as an approximate aisle location in their stores, but nothing in the way of ratings, reviews, or complementary products.
Safeway was acquired by
Like Publix, the product assortment is arranged in very basic categories, with few options for filtering. For example, when you drill down into the Cereal "aisle" you find your self presented with five categories of cereal:
Let's say I was looking for Kix brand cereal, one that is technically sweetened, but typically considered a staple when the kids no longer want Cheerios, but the parents aren't yet worn down to the point where they'll allow Lucky Charms or Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Is that an "All Family " cereal? Or a "Sweet" one? It turns out Safeway believes it is a "Sweet" cereal, though it considers Honey Bunches of Oats "All Family" – even though Kix has only 3g of sugar and Honey Bunches of Oats has 10g. This demonstrates one of the many challenges with how they've organized their product assortment online.
Safeway also provides basic label information on the product detail page, but does not enable any filtering or sorting by product ingredients or nutritional values.
Target just announced its partnership with Instacart for a limited part of Minnesota, but the company's website also carries groceries, often available for in-store pickup. Target, unlike Safeway and Publix, is a general merchandise retailer that also happens to sell groceries. From this perspective, you would expect that Target knows a little bit more about how to sell online, and be able to apply that knowledge to groceries specifically.
There are some examples of that. For example, on Target's grocery landing page, there is a significant investment in exposing different ways to shop other than by category.
In the upper lefthand corner, "fall favorites" features things like back to school lunch, Halloween candy, and tailgating. Further down in the center, the retailer features a special diets section, where you can shop by "gluten free" or "fair trade". Clicking on one of these options takes you to a very long list of dietary needs filters, including 0g trans fats, 100% whole grain, non-GMO, nut free, and pasture raised, to name just a few.
The retailer also allows for the distinction between what's in store, online only, and eligible for in-store pickup, making it easy to filter your selections based on what's available according to your delivery needs.
However, the filter options are strange. Sticking with the cereal category, cold cereals are both a drill-down within the "breakfast & cereal" category, as well as a filtering option.
And once you get to cold cereals, the filtering options become limited. Unlike in the special diets section, there is no way to filter the cereals by, for example, grams of sugar. Or nut free.
Target does, however, provide for keeping lists which should also sync with the Target app, and in addition to nutritional information, the retailer also provides rating and reviews. Are they better than traditional grocers at selling online? Yes, marginally. But that expertise still runs only skin-deep. When you get into the depths of product categories, there is still a gap in filtering and facets that shows, at least in the eCommerce department, the company has not thought much about how consumers would like to buy some of these grocery items.
Kroger is the largest traditional grocery in this top 5 list, and the closest grocer to being national (outside of mass merchants Target and Walmart). Kroger has a lot of banners – other grocery brands – that it sells through, and I'm going to focus on my local banner, King Soopers, which has been testing grocery delivery in the Denver metro area. I confess I have never used it – for the record, I get my groceries from Target.
King Soopers' test is interesting because it focuses only on products designed to meet specific health needs or lifestyles (thus the URL livenaturally.kingsoopers.com). If I want to stick with breakfast cereals, my first filter option is to browse "organic breakfast foods," unless I want to try to navigate via gluten free, paleo, or vegan as my alternative browsing options.
Within the organic breakfast foods assortment, there are no options to filter the results further, though this is not really an issue as the assortment is so limited – there are only 9 results.
King Soopers presents these results with little icons that represent a different "healthy" aspect to the food item. For example, in the image above, all of the products in the first row have a little turquoise "O" for organic.
The product detail page has ratings and reviews (and some actual reviews on there), as well as a very basic product description and an image of the nutritional label.
The company also does a good job of handling multiple flavors. Each individual flavor is represented as a product on the results page, but is also shown as a flavor option on the product detail pages.
Walmart (#1)
Walmart appears to be competing at a whole different level, namely against Amazon, rather than against other grocers. Even if you're not in a market where they're testing grocery delivery, the company has had its grocery assortment online for a few years now.
The landing page for cereal – forget about at the highest level of "Food" or "Groceries" – is a step beyond any of the other four sites.
The page features a rotating hero image and multiple ways to dig deeper into the cereal category – by sub-category, featured brands, special offers, special breakfast shops like gluten-free or sugar-free, and popular sub-categories.
Drilling into the sub-category "cold cereal" we get to filters, which include kid cereals as an option, dietary restrictions, items on promotion, brands, and price ranges. And selecting kids cereals got me to Kix right away (right above the Cookie Crisp).
The product detail page has the most detailed product description of products reviewed for this article, including related items, customer reviews, and the nutrition label.
The Bottom Line
As I started this article, I expected to find that grocers were woefully unprepared to take on eCommerce, and I confess I was startled to find they're farther along than I expected. There is still a lot of work to do to be effective at selling groceries online, but just these 5 retailers demonstrate some ways to get going.
There Are Ways To Start Small
Publix put a large assortment online, but isn't selling most of it that way. King Soopers (Kroger) put a very small assortment online and is selling that limited assortment – keeping things small and simple at first. Both are valid approaches for dipping the toe in the eCommerce water, and probably a less complex approach than Safeway's Palo Alto pilot, which requires full eCommerce for a full assortment, just in a limited delivery area.
Use In-Store Knowledge To Better Sell Online
There is literally decades of research into what grocers call "shelf approach," which is how consumers shop a category when they approach that category in the store. For example, what is one of the most important things that consumers want to know first about coffee? Answer: is it regular or decaf? Theoretically, that should be one of the first things that grocers present to consumers when they are browsing coffee selections. But of the 5 grocers here, only Target offered that option.
All of that knowledge should be presented in the filters and facets that retailers use to help consumers navigate a large assortment, right up there with dietary considerations (when it comes to food, at any rate). I think grocers sometimes fear that allowing consumers to narrow in too quickly on what they want will reduce the opportunity for inspiration from browsing, but that should be where related or complementary products on a product detail page become important – and really only Target and Walmart had done much in that area.
Leverage Product Information Management To Expand Product Details
Product information management, or in this case, the ease in passing product information from manufacturer to retailer, is nowhere more mature than it is in grocery. So for some of these retailers to have a very basic product detail page with almost no description whatsoever is somewhat baffling. That information is floating around in an internal system somewhere, I guarantee it, but it's not being used on the eCommerce site. Hopefully these retailers aren't recreating the wheel for web content, but I suspect some of them, not knowing what the enterprise already has, are indeed doing just that.
This makes the road to eCommerce for grocery much longer than it needs to be. And right along with using in-store knowledge to sell better online, it's all about leverage. The companies that can leverage existing knowledge across channels will get to the end result faster.
Online grocery sales, coupled with home delivery, is closer than it looks. But the online gaps demonstrate just how much more grocers need to learn.
