关于one fifth of all grocery spending — a total of $100 billion — is expected to come from online shoppers by 2025, according tonew statistics from the Food Marketing Institute and Nielsen。
The number represents the volume of shopping done at 3,900 grocery stores, according to FMI. Executives agreed: It’s time for some radical changes in the industry.
Benno Dorer, CEO of the Clorox Company, said this means grocery leaders have to relearn the business. The slow-to-change grocery space and the business models that executives honed decades ago are undergoing tectonic shifts.
“我们必须从数字化到数字化，并知道这是什么样子，” Dorer在FMI在亚利桑那州斯科茨代尔举行的FMI仲冬执行会议小组中说。
在杂货行业中，成为数字化是一个越来越多的主题，它比其他形式的零售业要慢得多。几十年来，服装和消费品一直在完善他们的数字零售业务，但许多消费者仍然进入实体杂货店进行所有购物。
That's quickly changing. Today, according to FMI and Nielsen stats, about 30% of shoppers regularly shop online, and they do about 25% of their grocery shopping there.
“我们必须从数字化到数字化，并知道这是什么样子。”
Benno Dorer
CLOROX公司首席执行官
In the next 10 years, the percentage of shoppers doing their grocery shopping online is expected to more than double. Nearly three-quarters of all shoppers — 72% — are projected to conduct 25% of their grocery shopping online by 2025. And 40% of all center-store shopping — nonperishable canned, boxed and bottled goods, as well as health and beauty items — is expected to come from online shoppers.
But as retailers scramble to meet the demands of the current and future digital customer, industry leaders said at the conference, it’s important to stay focused on the problem that grocery stores actually face.
“这不是关于技术的对话。这是关于消费者的。”多尔说。“公司将更好地了解消费者。…为此，制造商和零售商必须共同努力。”
基本挑战
高管同意杂货傅需要开始ndamental changes to address the shoppers who are moving online. But not everything is changing, according to Dave Bornmann, Publix Super Markets Inc.’s senior vice president of business development in grocery, customer service and fresh.
他说，即使有72％的消费者在网上进行杂货店购物的四分之一，仍将在店内进行75％以上的购物。这意味着商店将有两种不同类型的购物者需要迎合。
Bornmann在论坛上说：“这将是您必须经历的一种进步，以不同的方式选择产品，然后申请并集中精力。”“这是我们不习惯的另一种方式。”
这些数字购物者是谁？他们想要什么？
很少有概括可以轻松进行 - 除了他们可能喜欢数字购物的是个性化。凭借来自网络点击，购物者忠诚度计划，与移动应用程序的互动，过去订单和消费者感兴趣的物品的更多购物数据，零售商拥有一些可轻松可用的购物体验所需的信息。但是，有了现在可以连接的其他数据，零售商可以得到更大的了解：他们可以发现哪些购物者每天可能去健身房，在社交媒体上发布的内容等等。
Chris Morley, president of Nielsen USA, recommended retailers invest in solutions and people that can take data that connects in-store behavior with the rest of a shopper’s life and measures it.
“From an analytics perspective, it’s extremely helpful,” Morley said to the panel.
Mark Baum, FMI’s senior vice president for industry relations and chief collaboration officer, advised retailers to recruit people who can do this kind of data work. He has seen and heard excitement through the industry about the possibilities that online grocery and personalization through data presents.
To better tackle the problem, Baum suggests more collaboration and sharing of best practices than the industry may be used to. Since research and decisions made right now impact profits and losses industry-wide, retailers and manufacturers should all work together.
鲍姆说：“让我们将资源融合在一起，了解购物者，提供该解决方案。”“我们应该将其视为一家综合公司。”
One of the places where collaboration is most necessary is setting up product information that offers a seamless experience. Product pictures and information should be the same on store shelves and online. Several industry experts said this is the kind of thing that sounds simple, but remains difficult to execute. Manufacturers could be very helpful, Bornmann said, in ensuring that the information that goes with each product and each size is standardized.
“Let’s bring our resources together to understand the shopper, deliver that solution. We should look at this as one integrated company.”
Mark Baum
senior vice president of industry relations and chief collaboration officer, Food Marketing Institute
Consumers are key, he said. Retailers and manufacturers can work together with customers to make it easy to find products on the site. For example, a manufacturer or retailer may classify a product as something like a “beauty bar,” while a customer may want to find it by searching for “soap.”
小组成员建议，客户会为产品制作描述性的“浪漫副本”来繁重。消费者倾向于在社交媒体和产品评论中谈论产品，并且他们提供的描述不仅适合消费者对产品的看法，而且他们将使用可以用作搜索词的关键字。
寻找解决方案
With the digital revolution transforming grocery, retailers are looking at a number of different solutions: Should retailers be offering delivery? Pick up? Should shelves be more interactive with shoppers? Are third-party contractors for picking and delivering products the answer?
Right now, there isn’t any one answer, panelists agreed. Baum said there are all sorts of experiments going on with retailers trying new things and seeing what works.
“At the end of the day, every retailer I’ve talked to says we’re going to do what they customer wants us to do… and do it profitably,” he said.
The new order of business is disruptive to the existing supply chain, Bornmann said. Many grocery stores are within a few miles of customers’ homes, so there’s a location network that retailers should take advantage of. But questions remain: Which items go to stores? Which items go to distribution centers for shipping? And how should employees be distributed?
他说：“我们有很多在线购物者在同一天想要他们的产品。”“您必须考虑这样做的劳动力。这需要大量的劳动，您必须研究如何提高订单以提高效率的方法。”
Then there is the question of cost and pricing. Grocers should charge extra for the convenience of online shopping; Bornmann said he has never been able to find a third party to do other household chores like dry cleaning or lawn care for free, for example. There are ways to make these services cost-efficient, he added, and they involve more partnership with CPG manufacturers.
Retailers should still try to get customers to come into the store, Dorer said. It’s where the greatest share of shopping will still take place, and it’s also the lowest cost option for digital convenience.
他说：“有一个很大的推动力，要付出包装，数据和供应链的费用。”“有很多方法可以在后室内拿出成本，这不会影响消费者。您只需要弄清楚如何使用商店即可。”
With 40% of center-store purchases eventually coming from digital shoppers, Replenium CEO Tom Furphy told the panel that product replenishment and subscriptions are the key to the future. Furphy’s company works with Amazon, where he was previously vice president for consumables and Amazon Fresh. Most of Amazon’s grocery success has been with center-store products, some of which have come through the retailer’s “subscribe and save” program. Through the program, consumers can choose to get products they buy on a regular basis-ranging from cleaning products to diapers-定期以折扣价发送给他们。
While this program is effective, it's not without its flaws, Furphy said. But the idea of helping consumers automate some aspects of their regular shopping is lucrative.
“You should be leveraging the data that you have on those products,” he said. “Think of traditional product subscriptions as on the way out. Full-basket replenishment, that’s the next thing.”
“Think of traditional product subscriptions as on the way out. Full-basket replenishment, that’s the next thing.”
汤姆·弗菲（Tom Furphy）
CEO, Replenium
Loyal online customers tend to spend more money than those who only use the services occasionally, according to Bornmann.
Automatic replenishment adds a degree of automation to the shopping process-Furphy说，这是削减成本的好方法，因此可以在业务其他地方进行再投资。他鼓励零售商接受自动化。
However, panelists cautioned that while grocery stores need to change their business models, they also need to keep some core aspects the same. Despite the digital revolution, grocery retailers will need to keep doing what they do best: Staying close to the customer and providing them with a good and thoughtful shopping experience, delivering the products they need, introducing them to new things, and continuing to build trust.
“Whatever that medium is going to be, it’s all about service to the customer,” Baum said.
