In its latest report, Incisiv showed how grocery retailers have responded to consumer demand changes as a result of COVID…in the area of their “digital maturity.” Retailers have made progress, there is still a lot of opportunity.
But, four Itasca customers made the list of 90. Congratulations to Wegmans (17), Weis (26), Price Chopper (39), Sobeys (67).
Some of the specifics that were cited within the report warrant a bit of a closer look.
Starting with “inventory visibility,” something near-and-dear to our hearts here, only 48% of customers are satisfied with what’s presented to them by the retailer. That’s less than half of the respondents and is really an indictment on the lack of information grocers present to their customers electronically. Further, and this might be even more damning because it forced customers to do something they felt was abnormal at a time when we all are looking for more normalcy, only 26% (a bit over 1 in 4) shopped at their preferred grocer due to “stock availability.” Customers don’t remain loyal when retailers don’t have products in-stock.
When it comes to financial performance, retailers who are digitally mature perform better. Those companies grew at a 6% rate, while those that don’t rank as high are only between 1-6%, with some less than 1%. Further, since the pandemic started, digitally mature companies grew at 19% – or 2.4 times the average. These statistics show any investments in digital prowess pay off in spectacular fashion.
Incisiv reports that only 3% of retailers provide the ability to filter for unavailable products. This hasn’t changed from last year. Customers tell Incisiv they’d love this information, but retailers without solutions like Itasca’s that provide real-time balance-on-hands, really can’t. But, when they do, the fulfillment rates go up drastically. For example, an Itasca customer automatically pre-filters the results on their ecommerce search results to display ONLY AVAILABLE ITEMS. So, a customer can’t order a product that’s not available to deliver or pick-up. This is HUGE and increased their “as-ordered” fill rate to 94%. Only retailers with real-time perpetual inventory capability can do this.
Further, only 12% of retailers provide their customers the ability to check in-store inventory on the product detail page of their grocer’s ecommerce site. This is a differentiating capability that customers say they value in making a choice of where to buy their groceries. Same thing applies: only retailers with real-time PI capability can do this.
These capabilities fall into something we call Click. Confirm. Collect – and we’ve seen this coming and make the capability available to any retailer who wants to better serve their customers online.
Schedule a time to discuss our unique capabilities in this important area.
Read more about the report here: https://www.supermarketnews.com/consumer-trends/bj-s-publix-brookshire-s-among-most-digitally-mature-grocery-retailers