e-grocery rating Portugal 2022 launch announcement

research of digital customer experience in the online supermarkets

Published in

e-grocery

7 min readApr 24, 2022

E-grocery is a challenging area of e-commerce that has shown significant growth over the last few years. According to a McKinsey report focusing on the European e-grocery market —

“In the midterm, we expect the growth to continue, with e-grocery reaching above 20 percent of share in 2030 depending on the country and scenario”, and
“One-third of consumers who shop online weekly get their groceries at three or more e-commerce players”.

Portugal is still on its way to getting a significant share of online grocery sales. Despite this, recently, many retailers started to improve their digital channels — web and mobile apps.

Graph 1. Percentage of online shoppers who buy groceries online

At the moment, leaders from the “Top-250 world best retailers” list compete in the Portuguese market —

#8 Aldi (Germany) — the retailer has web and mobile apps with the option to create a shopping list, #4 Lidl (Schwarz Group, Germany) has a mobile app with an option to create a shopping list. Both do not sell online yet, #37 Mercadona (Spain) plans only to expand its physical presence and not online, according to the strategy statement,
Portuguese retail group #49 Jerónimo Martins (Pingo Doce) offers its customers — the e-grocery store service in partnership with Mercadão (Glovo group),
Portuguese retailer #144 Sonae (Continente) has its own e-grocery store,
6 European companies — #22 E.Leclerc (France), #26 Intermarché (France), #29 Auchan (France), #72 SPAR (Austria), #97 El Corte Inglés (not only FMCG, Spain), #138 Mini Preço (DIA, Spain) are also presenting e-grocery service to the Portuguese customers.

Out of the Top 250 retailers raking, Froiz (Spain) and Apolonia Supermercados (Portugal) have part of the market in Portugal with their online services.

These companies have a great experience through a lot of years to understand how to do the FMCG business successfully and how to build long-term relationships with their customers.

So, in the modern world, they are also competing on the digital scene — Continente was named “cheapest online supermarket”, Pingo Doce — “most convenient”, Minipreço and Froiz got the result — “their shopping baskets are 3% to 10% more expensive”, El Corte Inglés and SPAR — “the most expensive online supermarkets, charging 11% to 19% higher prices than the cheapest supermarket, depending on the day.”

All the retailers have different business and operational models, and they target different customer profiles, but most of them have focused on their digital channels as part of a long-term and sustainable strategy.

e-grocery rating 2022 Portugal

e-grocery rating 2022 Portugal is syndicated quantitative research of the Portuguese market of services that offer to buy food online. We include in our research supermarkets, that follow 2 parameters and have

a chain of physical stores in Portugal,
and an online store (web version).

So, we have the following online supermarkets to be researched:

Table 1. e-grocery rating 2022 Portugal research participants

The objectives of the research are to

evaluate and compare the functionality of online supermarkets,
reveal the benchmark of the “best e-grocery store”: bring the independent observation of the e-grocery market and share the knowledge of what the stores give more features to the customers during online food purchasing,
create a rating of the best e-grocery stores,
perform the analysis of the best practices for TOP-3 online stores,
bring the understanding if online stores have flexibility and personalisation to serve the customers in the best digital way,
provide retailers with the insights to enable them to make further improvements,
observe the level of digital maturity at the front-end systems of retailers' IT landscape.

How do we evaluate the functionality?

We created a concept of “best e-grocery store” based on research we have been performing since 2017, represented by our checklist with 300+ parameters.

We do a detailed study of every 10 e-grocery stores by following parts of the online store parts —

Information for the customers (20+ parameters )
Food catalog (100+ parameters )
Product page (50+ parameters)
Cart (30+ parameters)
Placing an order, incl. payment (50+ parameters)
Push, e-mail, SMS notifications about the order (20+ parameters)
Profile and customer area(50+ parameters).

Usually, during the new research, we enrich the checklist with new features that we see in e-grocery stores, so our checklist has been evolving with every study.

Update after the research was completed — checklist was upgraded and has 700 parameters now

Based on the features presented in the Portuguese online services, we fill in the checklist and define the final score of every e-grocery store, and create a rating of the best digital channels selling groceries on the Portuguese market at the moment.

Research period

Right now we are in the process of conducting the research and plan to reveal the results in September 2022.

Who can be interested to buy a detailed research report

You are a retailer and your service is in our research list — you can buy the research report and benefit from using it. You can also go deeper and order CJM audit of your service. You will be able to consult with us in case you will have any questions about the research.
You are a retailer and your service is not in our research list — we will conduct research of your company’s service as well without an additional fee if you buy the standard research report. Information about your e-grocery store will be presented in the comparison with other e-grocery players, so you can easily track the state of your service in the rating list.
You are the producer or sales representative of the grocery brand, additionally, to the standard report, we can check for you how your products are presented in the digital channel of your partner, a Portuguese retailer.
You are from IT software company and do development of digital services for your customers-retail companies — by purchasing the research report, you will be aware of the features of the e-grocery, so you will be prepared for the meetings with your customers and the requirements that they might have for the projects and upcoming developments.
You are performing the analysis of EU e-commerce, researching digital services, and are interested in the e-grocery market and would like to know more, with the research report you can get the knowledge you need and create a vision of this area’s evolution.

What you will get

e-grocery rating 2022 Portugal research report results (100+ slides presentation, .pdf format)
checklist, filled out with results of study 300+ parameters in every of 10 e-grocery services.

Why buy

to know the current functionality benchmark of the digital services on the Portuguese e-grocery market,
to have both a high-level outlook and a detailed view of competitors’ stores, get the knowledge of how competitors work, what new features they brought with the last updates,
to see what is the position of your store in the e-grocery market, what advantages and disadvantages it has,
to get insights for the evolution of your e-grocery channel and adapt the strategy of its development,
to have an independent view of the e-grocery area.

How you can use it

make familiar yourself, board members, investors of your company with the current state of level of functionality development on the e-grocery market, and rating of the best e-grocery stores,
bring research data for the discussion to the team — customer quality analysts, product managers, UX/UI designers, development team, etc.,
adapt the backlog of your product — bring new stories based on the benchmark and do prioritisation based both on the competitors’ existing features and what is important for your customers,
do the new developments with knowledge of what features other e-grocery stores on the market have and what are the trends,
influence the market with new features of your e-grocery store and see the place of your store in the next rating (e-grocery rating will be conducted 1–2 times per year).