Shopper marketing blog

As a leading digital shopper marketing agency, we work with hundreds of FMCG clients a year. Through delivering our ratings & reviews solution for brands in grocery supermarkets we have either worked directly with or been privy to reporting on digital shelf from the top suppliers around the world. We are also asked regularly by clients, who do we know or would we recommend working with on grocery digital shelf analytics, monitoring and reporting. 

There is of course no simple answer to who to work with. There has to be a good fit between the supplier and the client. A Tier 1 multi-category, multi-country brand led manufacturer should probably work with a supplier who can satisfy their teams across their priority markets. Likewise, if you only have one category in one country, then a smaller local player may be a perfect fit.

Below are the main grocery digital shelf reporting providers we are aware of and some areas for comparison to help you choose between them, as well as links to their sites for easy reference. 

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: