eGrocers Risk Losing New Customers to Lack of Trust

For online grocers, it takes more than a few orders to earn consumers’ trust. In fact, according to data from PYMNTS’ recent study “Satisfaction In The Age Of eCommerce: How Trust Helps Online Merchants Build Customer Loyalty,” more often than not, it takes more than a year.

The report, created in collaboration with Riskified, reveals that two-thirds of customers who have been purchasing grocery items online from a given merchant for less than a year are “slightly or not at all trusting” of their eGrocer. These trust levels are well below online retailers overall, since only 36% of customers who have been shopping from a given eTailer for less than a year report being slightly or not at all trusting of said merchant.

Read more: Report: Merchants Risk Losing 40% of Online Retail, Grocery Customers Over Trust

On the flip side, grocers who can make it over this 12-month hurdle have the opportunity to secure consumers’ loyalty in the long term. The study, which drew from a census-balanced survey of more than 2,100 U.S. adults, found that only 29% of those who have been shopping with a given eGrocer for between one and five years are mistrustful, while nearly half rank themselves as “very or extremely trusting.”

Notably, only 21% of those who have been shopping with a given eGrocer for more than five years say that they are very or extremely trusting of their merchant, but this small share may have as much to do with how uncommon online grocery shopping was back before 2017 as anything else.

One of the key ways that online grocers can build this sense of trust is by leveraging data about consumers to offer a personalized experience.

“[There’s now] the expectations that your online grocer understands you, the expectation that they save you time, the expectation that the next time you come there, they’re able to really offer you a better reflection of what you need, as opposed to the same patterns that you would see in a physical grocery store,” Alex Weinstein, chief digital officer at online grocer Hungryroot, told PYMNTS in an interview earlier this year. “If in 2020 the typical purchasing pattern was going to your online grocery destination and pressing the reorder button, today consumers want more. They want variety. They want recommendations.”

Read more: eGrocery Customers Expect More Than Digital Shelves; They Expect Personal Relationships

This kind of data-informed personalization has the ability to recreate some of the experience a shopper would get at a physical grocery store that they have been visiting for years.

“Loyalty programs can create the sense of recognition and engagement no different than if you walk in one of our stores where you’ve been shopping for 20 years, and we say, ‘Hey, Mrs. Jones, how are you?’” John Ross, president and CEO of the Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA), told PYMNTS in a December interview. “Digital technology does allow you to replicate a lot of the effects of high quality of service.”

See also: Supermarkets Rethink Physical and Digital Aisles for Grocery’s Connected Future