Online, brick and mortar and everything in between - grocery COVID-19 example

Building online presence for your brick and mortar business is an uneasy task. Sometimes you have to act fast, think Kodak or Blockbuster, while on other occasions the adoption goes painfully slow, like with groceries. It is a sector providing opportunity to tap into recurring spend every household has, therefore not surprisingly first online supermarkets were launched in late 90s, however they often did not survive dotcom bubble. Today, more than 20 years later, still only 10% of US shoppers regularly shop for groceries online.

The major barrier for adoption of online groceries is perceived convenience of picking fresh items by oneself. It is hard to directly tackle it and the process of overcoming it seems to be a slow one. The key to unlocking it might be in introducing services that step in between grocery shopping in traditional brick-and-mortar stores and fully online door-to-door delivery.

Pick-up options are on the rise. Instacart, a same-day delivery service, introduced Instacart Pickup service in US, which enables customers to order their groceries ready for pickup at their convenience. Dedicated app supports live location tracking to enable curbside pickup.

Instacar.com website

In Europe, large retailers have been experimenting recently with enhancing its pickup service by creating dedicated in-person pickup spots in stores, as well as drive through-like spaces in malls' parking lots for groceries pickup. Carrefour extended their "order online pickup at store" option with dedicated phone line for their less tech-savvy customers. Others experiment with 24/7 fully automated self-service stores with no personnel (e.g. Carrefour, Żabka).

Carrefour Express 24/7 self-service store

Sources:
1. https://www.onespace.com/blog/2018/10/online-grocery-lessons-history/
2. https://www.businessinsider.com/online-grocery-report?IR=T
3. https://www.supermarketnews.com/online-retail/instacart-sees-2020-year-grocery-pickup
4. https://antyweb.pl/carrefour-wyprzedzil-zabke-i-otworzyl-swoj-pierwszy-sklep-bez-obslugi-i-kas-otwarty-24-7/