**4. Grocery shopping behavior predictions for the post-pandemic era and potential areas for future research**

Some shopping behavior changes we discussed in the last section are temporary, but some will become permanent as they continue in the post-pandemic era. In this section, we will attempt to lay out some important behaviors that we expect to observe throughout the e-commerce grocery shopper journeys post the pandemic.

#### **4.1 The continuing adoption/use of curbside pickup and home delivery services**

Foremost, post-pandemic grocery shoppers will keep using or adopting the curbside-pickup-from-store and home-delivery-from-store services. While neither of these services were new, the pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated their adoption and built up the momentum for them to become a major part of the consumers' grocery shopping journey. Redman predicted that in the U.S., e-grocery sales would climb to 21.5% of total grocery sales by 2025 [6]. Shopping via those e-commerce channels will be one major pandemic-driven service feature that will become a permanent and bigger part of grocery retailing. This will make Section 2 of this discussion highly relevant and valuable to understanding grocery shopping behavior in the post-pandemic era. Admittedly, all the research discussed in Section 2 uses pre-COVID data, which may lead to a more conservative estimated magnitude than in the post-pandemic era. As such, we call for new studies to use post-COVID data to validate their conclusions.

Both curbside-pickup-from-store and home-delivery-from-store will continue growing post-pandemic. The latter will continue to ripen at a fast pace. However, we believe that between the two, curbside-pickup-from-store will persist as the bigger e-commerce channel for grocers. The home-delivery-from-store volume will only surpass curbside-pickup-from-store in major markets. In addition to the high costs associated with delivering, which will be a nearly insurmountable hurdle for most markets in the U.S., consumers' mobility patterns will also play a defining role. One key consumer behavior post-pandemic will be households traveling outside of the house again at near pre-pandemic rates. Not all shopper movement behavior will be the same, but we predict that households that are looking to travel outside of their home will be the determining factor for the stickiness of curbside pickup service.

#### **4.2 Moving from 3rd-party service to 1st-party service**

A large number of grocers had set up curbside-pickup-from-store and home-delivery-from-store services pre-pandemic. However, in many of those cases, grocers did not offer customers their own, 1st-party e-commerce shopping experience. The actual service was provided by 3rd-party marketplaces, with Instacart ultimately becoming

#### *Consumers' Curbside Pickup and Home Delivery Shopping Behavior in the Post-Pandemic Era DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107377*

the largest. That was primarily because grocers' resources (internal employees, budget, etc.) prevented them from delivering an experience that was even remotely consistent to the quality that they delivered in their physical footprint. Additionally, pre-pandemic the e-commerce shares of many food retailers were well below 10% of their total sales, which resulted in these retailers not acting on the significant investment needed to establish a 1st party e-commerce shopping experience.

As the pandemic went on and kept being extended, grocers rushed to establish their own e-commerce shopping channels. Those that had not made investments in developing their own e-commerce shopping experience before were beholden to those marketplaces, not only for the technology and human capital infrastructure but also for the data. Grocers realized that they did not understand their own online customers since their agreements with 3rd party marketplaces resulted in the grocers not having access to those shopper's purchasing and customer journey data. Moreover, because of the e-commerce channel outsourcing, a grocer lost the ability to bring forward their brand proposition and brand reach to their current or future online shoppers.

The pain point of not being able to access their customers' data sped up many grocers' pace to develop and implement proprietary e-commerce channels. At this time, many grocers offer dual e-commerce shopping experiences to their customers through 1st-party and 3rd-party shopping options. We predict that post the pandemic, grocers will "push" their customers to use their own e-commerce channels and will battle with those 3rd-party marketplaces about who owns customer data. The ability to measure and react to consumer behavior using customer data will be an extremely important part of retailers successfully navigating the post-pandemic era. To that end, the future will hold more shoppers transitioning away from 3rd-party marketplaces to the retailers that they were loyal to before the pandemic and new retailers that they trialed during the pandemic and developped repport.

#### **4.3 Impulse and explorative shopping behavior in the e-commerce channels**

The growth of curbside-pickup-from-store and home-delivery-from-store is a great opportunity for grocers. However, it also poses new challenges to them (and manufacturer brands) at the same time. As shown in **Table 1**, consumers spend significantly less time to complete grocery shopping online compared to offline. The less time they spend, the less money they spend. This is probably because, as was discussed in Section 3, consumers are more likely to have and stick to a shopping list when they shop grocery online. Without all the powerful in-store instruments, such as calculated floor plan design and sampling stations, grocers need to find innovative ways to encourage their customers to extend their time spent on the retailer's website/app.

In a similar vein, consumers have done much less impulse purchasing when they do grocery shopping online. Grocers used to be big beneficiaries of consumers' impulse purchasing behavior such as purchasing wine displayed on promotional end caps or adding a candy bar to the basket in the check-out lane. Before the pandemic, consumers made three impulse buys a week, and 70% identified food as the main category [60]. Even worse, at this point in either curbside-pickup-from-store or homedelivery-from-store cross-sell and up-sell opportunities are virtually nonexistent (which was one of the reasons why grocers hesitated to invest in them pre-pandemic). It would be a tremendous missed opportunity for grocers to neglect impulse sales and cross-sell/up-sell opportunities after investing millions of dollars to set up their curbside-pickup-from-store or home-delivery-from-store infrastructure. Without

them, the brand experience, discovery, and personal connection would all disappear. The e-commerce channels may turn the store into just a warehouse. Because of that, we call for more research that can help grocers engage their consumers for more online impulse and explorative shopping behavior.

We believe that data and new development in technology will play a critical role here. The traditional search technique based on keywords and the traditional recommendation system based on, say, association rule technique, is not helpful. We need a new, smarter search engine or recommender that can not only "explore" but also "exploit." Consumer data will be the building block for any of those developments, which provides additional rationales for why grocers would like to set up their own e-commerce channels.

#### **4.4 (Un)healthy food choices in the e-commerce channels**

As discussed, consumers buy fewer new brands and products when they shop grocery via an e-commerce channel. Consumers are more likely to order what they have ordered before. Using Instacart data, Chintala et al. have shown that e-commerce shoppers on Instacart tend to have a 95% chance of purchasing the exact same brand/ item once it has been included in at least five previous baskets [61]. If a consumer has ordered healthy products before, they are more likely to order them again. But if a consumer has ordered unhealthy products before, their adverse effect can also be reinforced. We expect to see more disparities in healthy vs. unhealthy food choices post-pandemic.

The current marketing tools and techniques could make the disparity even worse. Taking targeted marketing as an example. If purchasing habits are healthful, a consumer will be targeted with products that fit that pattern; if purchases lean in the other direction, so will targeted marketing. While a technique such as collaborative filtering is very suitable to be used in Netflix's recommendation system, which recommends movies based on a person's tastes in movies predicted from his/her past movie consumption, it will only reinforce a consumer's unhealthy eating patterns if used by a grocer in its recommendation system. The development and application of new techniques to grocery e-commerce channels are warranted.

#### **4.5 Trip consolidation vs. disaggregation**

Pre-pandemic, consumer grocery shopping trips are most frequently segmented by the number of items within the purchase, resulting in pantry stock-up trips, fill-in trips, special purpose trips, and quick trips [62]. Among them, pantry stock-up trips are grocery shopping trips with the largest total number of items within the basket. A pantry stock-up trip typically consists of products that are from categories and subcategories that are mostly defined as planned. A relevant example of this would be toilet paper. Most households do not increase or decrease the amount of toilet paper that they use as it is mostly dependent on the average number of people within a household over the course of any given day. Because of this, a household could estimate the amount of toilet paper that they may need over a period of time.

With the fast development of online grocery shopping, consumers will also develop their strategies of mixing up online and offline channels to optimize their grocery shopping experience, for example, using curbside-pickup-from-store and/ or home-delivery-from-store services for bulky or other shelf-stable items, and using Brick-and-Mortar for fresh foods such as meats and produces. As a result, we expect

#### *Consumers' Curbside Pickup and Home Delivery Shopping Behavior in the Post-Pandemic Era DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107377*

to observe both trip consolidation and trip disaggregation at the same time in the post-pandemic future. For example, consumers are likely to continue pandemic buying stock-up behavior, leading to less-frequent stock-up trips with even larger number of items within a trip. At the same time, consumers will probably run other types of grocery shopping trips more frequently for their perishable goods needs.

In response to that, even before the pandemic, but increasing since then, service providers and retailers have started to offer some form of automated replenishment of these items. This trend has much bigger implications for the grocery industry post-pandemic. For example, this trend will have a big impact on the current grocery store floor plan, which typically includes a large center aisle section full of shelf-stable items. The size (most commonly measured in square feet) of the center store section will shrink because of the automated replenishment and those e-commerce channels. In addition, only sending specific items would most likely (depending on the total cost of the item) not be profitable to the retailer, and by excluding the consumer from the "purchase" removes the possibility for the consumer to add other products, either planned items or impulse purchases introduced along the e-commerce check out process to the basket that may make the overall basket's profitability go from negative to positive. Because of that, in the post-pandemic future, it is important to look beyond auto replenishment as the product shows up on the consumer's doorstep every x number of days/weeks.

#### **4.6 Shopping behavior affected by fee structure or labor supply**

As we have discussed in Section 2.3, the delivery and service fees associated with curbside-pickup-from-store and home-delivery-from-store can also affect consumer behavior. In fact, pre-pandemic many consumers avoided e-commerce groceries, especially home-delivery-from-store, because of the perceived high cost of service fees associated with inherent convenience, as well as the new phenomenon of tipping your delivery driver.

In the post-pandemic period, we expect that grocers will continue exploring various fee structures for their own e-commerce channels, while they also try to move their customers there from a 3rd-party channel. One way that some grocers have tried is to find a fee structure to alleviate the pressures created by an unstable labor supply, specifically around fulfilling consumers' curbside and delivery orders. For example, some grocers have incentivized consumers to select different curbside pickup or delivery time slots based on the service fees associated with those slots. It is well-documented that consumers undervalue their time and overvalue the cost of a service/delivery/fulfillment fee that has historically not been a part of the total receipt of their shopping trip. Because of this, a consumer's behavior of when they would like to have their order ready and what fulfillment methodology that they chose to utilize could be significantly influenced by the retailer or marketplace. In addition to the variability of the cost of various time slots across potential windows of fulfillment, some grocers have also begun to incentivize shoppers to increase their overall basket spend by offering free shipping on their shortest window of fulfillment. By doing this, customers are introduced to a new opportunity of impulse buying that does not have to be prefaced with the retailer prompting them with a set of items hoping that one of them will satisfy a need that they did not realize that they had prior to starting their shopping trip. The plethora of subscription models and fee structures that are emerging (and fast-changing) will be very much worth the research endeavor.
