The thriving growth of the online grocery market has continued to slow since the boom triggered by the pandemic, a study from Coresight Research has discovered.
The report, “U.S. Online Grocery Survey 2022,” found 54.3% of the 2,100 shoppers polled had purchased groceries online in the past 12 months. That is a decrease from 59% who said they bought online a year ago.
This trend shows no signs of changing. Over the next 12 months, 46.9% said they plan to buy groceries online, a decrease from the 49.5% who planned to do so in the 2021 Coresight survey. This marks the second year in a row that customer expectations for the upcoming 12 months were below actual behavior in the past year.
However, Coresight noted there is some good news for e-commerce grocery sales. The report found the 54.3% of consumers who did buy groceries online in 2022 is 4.8 percentage points higher than the 49.5% of those surveyed in 2021 who said they expected to purchase groceries online over the coming year. The 2022 percentage of online grocery purchasers, too, remained above the percentages for 2020 (52%) and the pre-pandemic period in 2019 (36.8%).
The share of customers doing the bulk of their grocery shopping online has also grown nearly four percentage points. In 2022, 28.3% of those polled did most or almost all/all their grocery shop online. That compared with 24.7% in 2021 and 14% in 2020.
Among retailers, Amazon and Walmart were the most popular retailers with online grocery customers. The study found 51.6% and 50.5% of 2022 survey respondents, respectively, made a purchase with those operators in the past 12 months.
Rounding out the top 10 most-shopped online retailers were Target (25.5%), Sam’s Club (16.1%), Costco Wholesale (15.7%), The Kroger Co. (13.6%), Whole Foods Market (13.1%), Aldi (8.4%), Publix (7.1%) and Albertsons/Safeway (7%).