Best Online Grocery Stores in the US
The coronavirus pandemic has massively reshaped consumer behavior. Not only have consumers started spending more time on social media, but they are also doing more online shopping. Grocery shopping is no exception to this.
Before COVID-19, the ecommerce share of US grocery sales for 2020 was forecast at 4.3 percent. But as brick-and-mortar stores shut and consumers began purchasing groceries online, the forecast was revised to 10.2 percent—more than double the original.
So where do US consumers consider to be the best places to order groceries online in the US?
Best Places To Order Groceries Online in the US
Recent survey results show that at the start of 2021, the list of the best online grocery stores in the US, as ranked by consumers, was topped by Walmart and Amazon. Incidentally, they are also the two largest retailers in the country in terms of sales.
Walmart’s online grocery sales accounted for over one quarter (27.2 percent) of the total market share, while Amazon’s made up 20.8 percent.
Together, these top two stores make up 48 percent of the total market share of the online grocery market in the US. In other words, almost one out of every two dollars consumers spend on purchasing groceries over the internet are transacted either on Walmart or Amazon.
The third best place to buy groceries online is Instacart, with a market share of 17.7 percent for the San Francisco-based company. Instacart saw exponential growth during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, with analysts saying it has become the “leading US online grocery aggregator.”
In fact, the number of shoppers purchasing from Instacart skyrocketed from 70,000 in 2019 to over half a million in 2020. The number of times the Instacart app was downloaded during the pandemic was also around 30 percent higher than pre-COVID-19 times.
After Instacart is hypermart Target, with 3.7 percent of the market share. This is followed by online groceries ordered via specialized services on Amazon such as Amazon Fresh, Prime, and Go. In total, these hold a market share of 2.9 percent.
These five best places to order groceries online in the US currently dominate the market. With a total market share of 72.3 percent, they are where US consumers are spending the most money on online food groceries.