Rating the seamless grocery shopping experience: Target, Walmart & Kroger

Target earned top ratings in two of the three components when it went head to head with Walmart and Kroger in the Brick Meet Click Seamless Grocery Shopping assessment.

If omnichannel is a business strategy whose goal is to enable shopping from anywhere, for anything, and any way a customer wants, then our seamless shopping rating highlights progress and opportunities against that goal.

The 3-As Growth Framework

The assessment reflect show each retailer performed at delivering a seamless grocery shopping experience to its customers across multiple factors that are captured within three components that affect the business results: Accessibility, Attractiveness, and Acceptability.

> Accessibility. What share of the retailer’s customers has access to the full menu of the retailer’s shopping tools and services?

Target's rating (3.7 out of 5) reflects that it is further along with rolling out its various online shopping options, which in turns encourages increased penetration and usage of its mobile app and the features it offers.

> Attractiveness. Are the perceived benefits associated with the tools and services strong enough to convert interest to trial?

At 2.7, Target slightly trails Kroger (3.0) on this component mainly because customers are not able to buy frozen or refrigerated products via Target’s store pickup services. Otherwise, each retailer has an opportunity to integrate its shopping solutions into a single app.

> Acceptability. Do the solutions improve shopping outcomes for the customers?

Related to finding products, Target is doing a better job via its search and in-store navigation capabilities.  It is also helping customers consider their choices based on ratings, reviews, and visibility into in-store inventory levels. Kroger is leading Target when it comes to helping customers save money with digital deals and coupons while Walmart promotes its Rollback pricing.

All three retailers have room to improve the checkout process via scan and go capabilities, but Target has a slightly more customer-friendly set of tools.

The net result is that Target earned an acceptability score of 3.8, compared to Walmart at 2.8 and Kroger at 2.7.

Target earns the top spot

The composite assessment reflects the relative importance of each of the components list above in achieving the seamless shopping experience to calculate the overall score.

Target earned the highest composite rating (3.4 out of 5), reflecting that it is ahead of both Kroger (2.8 out of 5) and Walmart (2.3 out of5), when it comes to providing digital tools that customers can leverage to improve the shopping experience regardless if of whether it’s online or at the store.

How strong is your omnichannel strategy?

Successful omnichannel strategies will strengthen a retailer’s results by improving shopper’s outcomes via a seamless shopping experience.  The key is taking a mobile-first approach to delivering solutions that aid the shopping/buying process, whether that’s in-store or online.

Brick Meets Click’s assessment is a powerful tool for two reasons: It helps a retailer 1) understand how it’s performing, and 2) identify where it should consider investing more resources to deliver a more seamless shopping experience.

Improving the way omnichannel strategies are developed and executed will increase the appeal and customer usage of a retailer’s mobile app, and ultimately trigger higher spend rates and stronger word-of-mouth mentions from customers.

If you are interested in learning more about how this assessment could help your organization, please contact David Bishop at david.bishop@brickmeetsclick.com .

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