Consumers want online grocery options now even more than they did when they were stuck inside all day, or at least that is what the fourth-quarter 2021 results of membership-free wholesale eCommerce retailer Boxed suggest.
In its first earnings call since going public via special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in June 2021, Boxed shared Monday (March 15) that gross profit grew 50% year over year in the quarter, and average order value grew 12%. Additionally, the company noted strong customer loyalty.
Read more: Amid Top Line Growth, Boxed SPAC Deal Hints At Online Grocers’ Profit Challenge
“Boxed Up loyalty program continues to be a compelling growth opportunity,” Boxed CEO Chieh Huang said on the call. “In 2021, compared to an average B2C customer, Boxed Up members ordered 2.2 times as frequently and spent approximately 215% more per customer, demonstrating the stickiness of that customer base.”
Online grocery shoppers tend to be more loyalty to their grocer than their in-store counterparts, according to data from PYMNTS’ study, Decoding Customer Affinity: The Customer Loyalty to Merchants Survey 2022, created in collaboration with Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions.
The report, which drew from the results of a census-balanced survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers in late fall 2021, found that these eGrocery customers make up only a small share of all grocery shoppers, with 18% favoring digital channels over physical ones.
Get the full report: Decoding Consumer Affinity: The Customer Loyalty To Merchants Survey 2022
However, the study found that these digital customers are more than twice as likely as in-store shoppers to be loyal and make grocery purchases from just one merchant, with more than one-third of the former doing so, compared to just 16% of the latter.
Conversely, brick-and-mortar shoppers are significantly more likely than their digital counterparts to purchase groceries from three or more merchants — 48% and 36%, respectively.
See also: eGrocery Customers Twice as Likely as Brick-and-Mortar to Be Loyal to a Single Merchant
In an interview with PYMNTS, Yuni Sameshima, co-founder and CEO of grocery marketing platform Chicory, noted that the company’s findings reveal the same trend.
“As we saw the world, at least for a brief moment, start to resemble a little bit of pre-pandemic normalcy with grocery shopping habits, we still saw that those who were buying online actually were more loyal,” Sameshima said.
Related: Shoppable Recipes Turn Brick-and-Mortar Grocery Shoppers into Omnichannel Customers
Additionally, eGrocers have the opportunity to gain share from grocery giants, making a dent in Walmart’s giant share of the total grocery market (roughly one-fifth in the U.S., per PYMNTS data from 2021).
See also: Amazon, Walmart and the Coming Food Fight in the US Grocery Game
“I imagine Walmart spends most of their time thinking about their battle with Amazon,” Misfits Market CEO and co-founder Abhi Ramesh told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in a November 2021 interview. “You have two dueling titans over here, but then there’s so much white space everywhere else … We’re taking brick-and-mortar customers from places like Walmart onto our platform, so I don’t know if they know about us yet, but they will soon.”
Read more: Misfits Market CEO Says Future of Grocery Stores Is Curated, Personalized and Online
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