34% of Consumers Buy at Least Some of Their ‘Usual’ Groceries Online

The continued shift toward digital commerce has changed the way we as consumers shop, pay and acquire the groceries we need to sustain us.

Trips out to the storefronts, in other words, to the parking lots, to the aisles with miles of produce have given way to digital means of getting greens (and, of course, everything else).

To that end more of us are buying groceries online than ever before. But there’s room for growth. A PYMNTS study found that 31% of consumers have bought retail items through online channels, while 17% had bought groceries that way.

As for the reasons they are doing so, 76% said it was because buying online has been more convenient — which outpaces the 60% who said the same thing in an October 2020 poll. Nearly two-thirds said they were worried about contracting COVID-19 when shopping in stores.

Drill down a bit, and the preferred means of doing that online shopping become apparent. More than half of the 2,300 consumers surveyed said that they’d been using mobile devices to do so, and about 37% said they’d chosen to use a laptop or a desktop computer. Only a low single-digit percentage chose voice channels to order their groceries online. As for those consumers who’d ordered the items online, and had them delivered to the home, a bit more than half used mobile devices.