Grocery is the least penetrated but fastest-growing category in ecommerce today. Traditional brands and retailers need to understand why this channel shift is accelerating and adjust their marketing and selling strategies accordingly.

Last year, the number of locations offering “buy online, pick up in-store” (BOPUS) nearly doubled among leading US grocery retailers. Walmart (and various third-party partners), Target/Shipt, Kroger/Instacart, Ahold and Albertsons brought their collective number of click-and-collect locations from 2,451 in January 2018 to 5,800 in December 2018, per data from CommonSense Robotics.

The online grocery market heats up following the news Amazon is planning to open a new line of grocery stores in locations across the US in 2019.

While retail ecommerce sales are growing rapidly in the US, brick-and-mortar shopping is still important to consumers. They’ll spend almost 90% of their retail dollars in person this year, and a large portion of that foot traffic comes from webrooming.

The online grocery market is starting to reach an inflection point, but in order to achieve success, retailers must overcome key logistical hurdles.

Last year, 81.4% of global consumers reported ordering items online for in-store pickup (up nearly 30% from the year prior) as more consumers are drawn to the service’s convenience and speed.