Online grocery market

Abstract

According to Nielsen’s report on ‘The Future of Grocery’ (Nielsen, 2015), the exponential increase in mobile adoption and internet penetration are the main drivers for the expanding online retail. It also states that the Asia Pacific region exceeds the global average with respect to the adoption of online retail. With tremendous growth witnessed in the online retail space with respect to electronics, apparels, books and kitchenware, huge scope lies in the organized grocery industry as well. According to one KPMG’s report on ‘Indian Retail’, only 8-10% of the retail market is organized, which is even less in case of groceries in India. Thus, with such a huge scope, the advent of multiple online grocers in India seems beyond reasonable. The changing lifestyle of people, increase in the personal disposable income in the hands of the consumers, increasing demand for variety, convenience and low prices and increase in the population of working women have led to the increase in the revenues of the online grocers. However, the presence of most online grocers is witnessed to be in the metropolitan or Tier 1 cities barring a few of the bigger players in this industry. Thus, we wanted to study the customer behavior patterns in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities.