Consumers’ Multi-Channel Shopping Experiences in the UK Grocery Sector: Purchase Behaviour, Motivations and Perceptions: An Extended Abstract

Abstract

Online grocery sales in the UK grew 14.9 % to £7.5 billion in 2014, but still represent just 5.1 % of all food retailers’ sales (Mintel 2015), despite large investments by an increasing number of retailers. This investment in multiple channels, including continuous investment in stores, is also spurred by evidence that in grocery shopping, as well as in other markets, many consumers routinely make purchases in different channels for different purchase occasions (e.g. Hand et al. 2009), switch between channels as they move through the purchase process (Slack et al. 2008) and hence require multi-channel operations from retailers (Weinberg et al. 2007). This evidence suggests that, in grocery shopping, traditional brick-and-mortar stores continue to be very important for consumers.