Shopper marketing blog

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The recent meteoric rise of artificial intelligence (AI) models is revolutionising how we interact with computers and access information online. But has AI made a significant difference in ratings and reviews, and is it what shoppers want?

Amazon has rolled out generative AI to create succinct product-level summaries of reviews for many of its products to support shoppers' decision-making process. Several clients have asked us to explore how this has impacted a shopper’s experience when using Amazon and understand how these features are perceived compared to ‘traditional’ ratings and reviews.

To do this, we created a study to research how regular Amazon shoppers use the site. The study simulates the shopping process for a selection of grocery category products. 

We received over 2500 responses, and our key findings challenge the notion that AI automatically benefits users.

The 4 key takeaways are:

1. Individual Ratings and reviews are as important as ever
2. Shoppers don't hang around when shopping for groceries on Amazon
3. Amazon's AI features are hardly used or even noticed
4. There is little evidence of AI improving the shopping experience, but the generations split opinion

It's obvious when you think about it, that for online grocery shoppers selecting products to put in their basket, product Rating out of 5 is always more important than the number of Reviews, right?

Well, wrong actually and not just wrong occasionally, wrong most of the time. From our research of 3,710 online supermarket shoppers we know that when the average Ratings for two similar products are different by as much as 0.3 eg 4.2 vs 4.5, then the number of Reviews is much more important in product choice. Let me give you an example:

In March we released our first list of Digital Shelf Analytics providers. Since then we've had lots of contact from and conversations with more providers, so we thought it best to update our list.

We've added five new providers below: Convert Group, DataGram, DataWeave, Detail Online, and Syndigo. We've also added Import.IO for those who want to go for themselves as they provide the base technology that some of the DSA companies use.

If you are a Digital Shelf Analytics provider who covers multiple supermarkets in multiple countries and isn't represented below, then feel free to get in touch to be included in our next update. 

In the future, we plan to contact providers directly to get more information on their offerings. If you wish to be the representative for your firm then please fill in your details here: Sign up to represent your company

Updated May 2021

We had a tremendous response to our first post in post in March 2021. Since then we have found no less than 9 more providers to add to our list as well as New kids on the block Brand Nudge. All the tables below have been updated with the latest information available. 

Q. What happens when the government says "stay at home"?

A. People get up early and go to the supermarket!

Kantar* have just said that grocery sales were up 20.6% in March to their highest ever level, peaking 16th - 19th March. From our analysis of shopper's receipts submitted to us as part of cashback claims, we can see that they were up much earlier than usual that week, probably to "avoid the crowds" or just get there when items are in stock. This happened again the week after, when the restrictions were increased as the chart below illustrates: