As COVID-19 has greatly impacted the growth of online grocery, RaboResearch has built a model to assess the long-term impact and project quarterly sales in the US through 2021. According to the model, e-commerce could represent anywhere from 4.8% to 9.1% of grocery sales by the fourth quarter of 2021, with the most likely scenario being approximately 6.4% of sales. Without COVID-19, online grocery would’ve represented approximately 4.7% of sales in the fourth quarter of 2021.
The research found that the long term growth of online sales will be driven by the length of the crisis, high intensity of use, and adding more first time users, but bad user experiences and limited capacity may negatively impact growth. Overall, the historical lack of investment in e-commerce means that there is very little risk for retailers to ramp up investments in their digital operations now.
Source: RaboBank, July 2020