The praise of laziness: convenience category attributes sustaining the growth of online grocery shopping

This study aims to explore the impact of category-specific attributes in determining the intensity of grocery shopping realized within the online channel. Using real sales data provided by Circana, we examined online purchases in each grocery category over the entire 2017 to 2022 timespan, and relying on Shopping Utility Maximization theory, we uncovered which category attributes influence e-commerce volumes sales. In particular, the influence of category-specific heuristics regarding the “convenience” offering, namely variety, perishability, bulkiness, and expensiveness in affecting online shopping is deepened. The dataset consists of 440 product categories and statistical analyses were conducted using the STATA software. We obtained significant results regarding: (i) higher online purchases of bulky & heavy products; (ii) lower online purchases of perishable goods and of channel expensive ones (products sold at a price which is higher online than offline). While overall variety of items and product expensiveness were not found as significant category-specific drivers/barriers of online grocery shopping