Online grocery is the big winner of the year
Grocery retail is without a doubt the e-commerce winner of 2020, with an exceptional growth rate of 95 percent for the full year, which corresponds to SEK 14 billion.
The percentage of e-commerce in the sector has almost doubled in just one year to y percent. This success story can be explained by factors such as new consumer groups (primarily older people) essentially being forced online during the pandemic, which changed deeply rooted shopping habits.
Another explanation is the sector’s low percentage of e-commerce, which allows for extreme growth figures – especially as the major stores now have an incentive to invest in e-commerce. The percentage of e-commerce consumers who took advantage of the convenience of buying food from the safety of their own homes amounted to 18 percent during the fourth quarter, which is an increase of 6 percentage points compared with the same period in the previous year.
The great demand has sometimes been too high for retailers to cope with. Home delivery of food requires refrigerated and frozen transport, and logistics are difficult to scale up quickly. During the toughest periods of the pandemic, consumers have therefore had to make do with long delivery times and fully booked home delivery slots. Coop and other grocery chains reserved a portion of their home deliveries for people over 70, and consumers were asked to book their deliveries early to be sure, for example, to receive them in time before Christmas Eve.
It remains to be seenin the future how lasting the new purchasing behaviors will be on the grocery side. Especially for the oldest consumer group. It is also noteworthy that large investments have been made in increased capacity, which guarantees that the strong e-commerce sales will continue even after the pandemic.
Source: The E-barometern annual report 2021
