Swedish supermarket starts ecommerce pilot

Selected customers are able to order their groceries online and then pick them up at the store or have them delivered directly at home, evigo.com reports. In the first step, Axfood is offering the project to its eployees only not wanting to make the mistake to be online too soon. According to a new study from RetailMeNot, Sweden was among the countries with the largest online sales in 2014 with USD 5.85 billion spent. As the official press release states, people in Sweden will spend increasingly more on ecommerce during the next ten years: up to about EUR 32 billion, according to a new report published by HUI Research.

As multichannel shopping matures in grocery, shoppers are expected to shift from upmarket to become increasingly mainstream. The impact of online shopping on a brand will be evident in the changes in behavior across other channels, since most customers will still spend in physical sores. The consumption categories predicted to shift online most rapidly are bulky, shelf stable, and frozen items.

According to a research from Dunnhumby, consumer behavior is similar across all markets: most are multichannel shoppers rather than being just online shoppers; the percentage of multichannel customers exceeds their sales penetration percentage, suggesting that the effect of the online shopping experience is larger than shown by sales numbers; multichannel customers are worth more to retailers (between 30% to 67% more on average), and multichannel customers are more valuable to brands (28% more). Most multichannel shoppers are from upmarket households.

The Hemköp pilot is not the only ecommerce activity from Axfood. It already conducted extensive ecommerce for groceries, in the form of B2B sales via Axfood Närlivs and B2C sales via Axfood Snabbgross. They also supply groceries to home delivery companies Linas Matkasse and Middagsfrid.