Shopper marketing blog

There is general agreement amongst members of the FMCG / CPG eCommerce community that grocery ratings and reviews are an important factor driving the rate of sale on retailer sites. However, many believe this is only when a shopper is actually doing their online shop.

Our research across nearly 3,000 regular grocery shoppers says this is not correct. These days, shoppers are looking for grocery product reviews both when they are in or near a store, at home, at work, and even walking down the street.

The key findings are:

• Online and Offline grocery shoppers regularly seek out and read product reviews. They can be at home, in-store or frankly anywhere when this happens.
• Google is the friend of the shopper seeking grocery reviews, so brand owners need to have enough good quality reviews in all relevant online stores.
• Shoppers are prompted most often to discover product reviews by seeing a product in-store, ads / social posts or when looking for a new product in a familiar category. Therefore it is critical if you are marketing to shoppers your products are supported with reviews.
• Research Online and Purchase Offline (ROPO) is a common grocery shopper behaviour but this is taking place at the fixture in an Omnichannel way. Many shoppers see a product they are curious about in the store, and their first instinct is to read the reviews wherever they find them, and then choose to buy it right away.

This research shows that grocery product ratings & reviews are used far more widely than just when shopping online and are a key driver of the purchase decisions online & in-store.

If you have been working in eCommerce for an FMCG company for any length of time, then you will already know how important ratings and reviews are to shoppers. In this blog article, we talk about how important it is not only to have product reviews on all the online supermarket websites but also that they need to be kept fresh.

Shoppers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their approach to ratings and reviews and have adapted their use of them over time. Today, to be influenced into buying a product shoppers not only need to see a good number of reviews (at least 30) but critically those reviews need to be recent (certainly less than 1 year, ideally less than 6 months old). To do this you need to ensure you continuously add reviews to your products ensuring the latest ones are constantly fresh.

The top reasons for keeping your reviews fresh are*:

• 97% of shoppers consider review recency as relevant when considering a purchase
• 86% of shoppers feel that review recency is more important when considering a product or brand they haven’t purchased before
• 62% would not purchase a product if the only reviews available were published a year or more ago.
• The number of reviews displayed by retailers has been growing, for example, the average number of reviews on ASDA.com has grown from 6 to 29 in 2 years
• As most shoppers only read between 1 and 10 reviews, recent unfavourable reviews can unfairly impact shoppers' perception of your brand or product

CheckoutSmart create groundbreaking online grocery shopping tracking service for FMCG brands & retailers in the UK

Today CheckoutSmart launched its online grocery shopping usage tracker as part of its SmartResearch services. Using feedback from thousands of grocery shoppers each month, CheckoutSmart will track the usage of the online grocery supermarkets, Amazon grocery, Food Aggregators and Q-Commerce all in one place.

This will allow brands & retailers to:

• Track the scale and trends of each grocery delivery sub-sector and the players within them. 
• Make decisions about their investments and the relative importance of each player
• Use the data to engage with their businesses in discussions about the prioritisation of channels and the resources required.

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. 

We surveyed members of CheckoutSmart to understand their experiences of shopping during Covid-19 and their views on how their behaviour will change when things "more or less return to normal". In total 4,324 members responded, over 3,100 of whom are also online grocery shoppers. 

The survey focused on how their grocery shopping experience had changed pre and during Covid-19 restrictions and their personal expectations on how their behaviour will change going forward. This blog article contains a summary of the most relevant results. More detail on specific topics may be available, please contact us to hear more.

The most significant finding is that online shopping could still grow even faster post Covid if retailers can address the two major concerns shoppers have of slot availability (which is surely just a matter of time) and the cost of delivery which must surely come down with scale and the the recent move by Amazon. 

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:

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: