September 1st, 2023, Lesley Simeon
The pandemic caused consumers to flock to the digital realm to shop for a variety of their needs, ranging from groceries and medicines to tech and healthcare products. A recent YouGov survey focusing on 18 international markets throws light on whether consumers’ shopping preferences have changed post the pandemic. In this piece, we focus on whether consumers prefer shopping for groceries offline or online.
Compared to other products, consumers would prefer shopping for groceries offline the most - over six in ten consumers (64%) would want to buy groceries offline than online in 2023. In 2022, 60% of global consumers reported that they prefer shopping for groceries offline.
Clothes (54%), vehicles (53%) and medicines (48%) are some of the other categories of products that global consumers would most prefer to buy at a physical establishment as opposed to online.
Conversely, video games (10%), travel services (15%) and insurance products or services (18%) are among the categories of products that consumers would least prefer to buy offline.
We also look at how likely consumers are to prefer shopping for groceries offline, by country.
Between 2022 and 2023, France and Indonesia report the biggest jump in consumers who would prefer buying groceries offline
Looking at how the numbers are across different markets, we see that Canada is right at top of the list of the markets surveyed, with close to eight in ten consumers here (77%) saying they prefer buying groceries offline rather than online, followed by the US (71%). In Great Britain, more than six in ten consumers (64%) agree they prefer buying groceries offline.
In France, more than six in ten consumers (64%) prefer buying groceries offline, recording the largest jump in consumers globally across markets who say so since 2022. Back then, almost half (48%) of the consumers reported that they would buy groceries offline than online.
Survey results from Europe are a mixed bag. The proportion of consumers in Italy that prefer buying groceries offline dropped ten percentage points, from a little over seven in ten consumers (71%) in 2022 to over six in ten consumers in (61%) in 2023. Germany saw a drop as well, from 71% to 68% in the observation period.
Numbers in Indonesia grew by fifteen percentage points between 2022 and 2023 (from 45% to 60%). Although France and Indonesia saw the greatest increases in the proportion of consumers who prefer to buy groceries offline they still have the lowest proportion of consumers with this preference of all markets surveyed.
But compared to 2022, an increased proportion of consumers in Spain and France say they prefer shopping for groceries offline in 2023. This year, almost seven in ten consumers (67%) in Spain claim they prefer buying groceries offline (up from 62% in 2022).
At nearly seven in ten consumers in each market, numbers in Denmark (67%) and Sweden (69%) remained mostly unchanged since 2022.
As for Asia, while the proportion of consumers in India and Singapore who prefer buying groceries offline remained mostly unchanged, Hong Kong reported a significant jump from the 52% figure reported in 2022.
Hong Kong along with Indonesia (60% each) leads the chart in Asia with the largest share of consumers who prefer buying groceries offline than online.
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YouGov Surveys: Serviced provides quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 18 markets with sample sizes varying between 437 and 2045 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in July 2022 and June 2023. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash