UK Online Grocery Market Share Grew Just 1% In 2017

“Despite the hype and attention given to online and its ability to change the way people shop, the reality seems rather different,” says Nielsen’s analytics business partner Aylin Ceylan.

“Although online spend increased by around £300m last year, a 0.1% rise in market share is a rather pedestrian rate.”

“Many will be surprised it’s not faster but online shopping in grocery, unlike many other sectors, is much more a complementary option to stores not an ‘instead of’ option,” she added.

Ceylan pointed the fact that tackling overall popularity of online shopping with UK consumers will require different tactics altogether, considering neither basket size nor popularity which seems to be an issue for the online grocery sector.

“Two-thirds of people who buy groceries do so online and the average online basket is around four times bigger than an in-store one,” Ceylan told press, adding that Nielsen believe the issue is a “frequency one”.

On average people buy groceries not more than once a month (11 trips) compared to nearly 21 a month in-store (247 per year).

Online shopping is dominated by the big shop and weekly trips which account for twice the share of online trips (82%) than they do for in-store trips (44%) according to Nielsen’s results.

“In other words, the regular smaller ‘top-up’ shops account for just 18 per cent of online trips compared to 57 per cent for in-store,” Ceylan added.

Grocery stores who have epos systems have the perfect figures of their sales from online and in-stores. They manage their sales and inventory according to the trends and customers.