Dive Brief:

• Grocery e-commerce sales totaled $8 billion in March, about the same as their level during the same period a year ago, according to figures published Wednesday by Brick Meets Click and Mercatus.
• Pickup garnered approximately 43% of online grocery sales last month, delivery accounted for 39% of the market and ship-to-home claimed an 18% share.
• While the online grocery sector has lost momentum in recent months, digital sales remain significantly higher than they were before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dive Insight:

The revenue grocers brought in from e-commerce customers in March was up by more than a fifth compared with March 2020, a trend fueled by pickup’s sustained popularity with shoppers, Brick Meets Click reported.

Pickup rang up $3.5 billion in sales in March, in line with the figure for the same month in 2023. Delivery sales moved down slightly year over year, to $3.1 billion, while the ship-to-home channel, which includes orders delivered by carriers like UPS and FedEx, saw sales tick up to $1.4 billion.

By comparison, online grocery sales were down in March 2023 by almost 8% year over year.

Pickup’s share of the grocery e-commerce market has jumped from less than a third in 2019 to more than 43% today, according to the research. Delivery has moved up even more sharply during the past five years, expanding its market share of 25% five years ago by almost 15 percentage points.

Brick Meets Click predicted that growth in the online grocery space would be calmer going forward than it has been over the past several years. The firm’s latest findings are based on a survey it conducted from March 29 to March 30 of 1,810 shoppers.

“While most people recognized that the pandemic was a catalyst for buying groceries online, few could fully anticipate the implications of that surge,” David Bishop, partner at Brick Meets Click, said in a statement. “Now, four years after COVID-19 first impacted our everyday lives, eGrocery in the U.S. looks very different from both a contribution and growth perspective, and this will impact how grocers and others expand and drive profitability in their respective businesses moving forward.”

Brick Meets Click emphasized that traditional grocers remain under intense pressure from mass retailers like Walmart in the competition to win online grocery business. More than a quarter of shoppers who placed an online order from a supermarket last month also made a digital grocery purchase from a mass merchant. By contrast, the cross-shopping rate was just 15% before the pandemic started.