THE PAST year saw a sharp increase in the number of people shopping online for groceries, according to ecommerce platform Buy4Now, bucking the downward trend seen by traditional shops.
The company’s client sites saw a 40 per cent rise in traffic in December alone, which translated into an average 20 per cent increase in sales volume.
Buy4Now’s software powers the online shops of Superquinn, Heatons and DID Electrical, among others; it also has clients in Britain and the US.
“The indigenous increase in Irish ecommerce has been pretty enormous,” said Michael Veale, Buy4Now chief executive.
“During the recession, people thought that growth online might struggle and what we’re actually witnessing is the opposite.”
Mr Veale attributed this increase to the fact that many were under time pressure and shopping for day-to-day items online was most practical for them.
The bad weather of the previous winter also had a residual effect, he said, with some who had used the service out of necessity continuing to do so out of convenience.
According to Mr Veale, the increase late last year was so significant that Superquinn had to increase its fleet of vans in Dublin, having reached capacity before Christmas.
Mr Veale said the volume of grocery shopping done online in Ireland was comparable to British figures, where it currently accounted for about 3.2 per cent of all spend.
He said a lot of this was because of an increased effort being made by retailers as they try to deal with decreasing footfall in a post-Celtic Tiger climate.
Many people still like to buy from physical shops, however, although they tend to research online first. This goes some way to explaining the gap between the rise in traffic and sales.
“They say about 75 per cent of all in-store purchases are bought by people who have researched online first,” said Mr Veale. He referred to these shoppers as Sobos – those who “shop online, buy offline”.
In the year ahead, Mr Veale said he saw mobile being a key factor in ecommerce, as web traffic is increasingly routed through the ever-growing number of smartphone devices in use.
“We have some clients who don’t have a mobile-friendly site set up but they’re still seeing 10-12 per cent of their traffic coming from mobile,” he said. “So even though users have to pinch and zoom and swipe around a site on their phone, they’re still shopping that way.”
