Consumer segmentation and choice preference on online grocery retailers and their fulfillment services

초록

The online grocery shopping market has been growing tremendously in many countries over the past few years. However, online shopping for groceries is very different from general online shopping because of the product’s perishability and the relatively frequent shopping activities as daily necessities. In response to the various customers’ needs and preferences for online grocery shopping, service outputs provided by online grocery retailers also vary greatly. This study aims to examine the factors influencing customers’ choice of online grocery retailers in terms of sociodemographic characteristics, shopping purpose, shopping frequency, purchase amount per order, price, product quality and freshness, convenience of online shopping websites, and delivery services. This study is based on the consumer survey conducted in January 2022 on the customers’ online grocery shopping behavior and the top four online grocery retailers based on their preference in South Korea: Coupang, Market Kurly (pure online grocery retailer), E-mart (omnichannel retailer), and Naver shopping (open market e-tailer). The clustering method is used to segment customers based on their sociodemographic attributes and shopping behavior. Then multinomial logit (MNL) model is used to analyze the impact of the factors influencing customers’ choice of different online grocery retailers. This research can provide meaningful insights for online grocery retailers to identify their target customers and determine their appropriate service output and fulfillment strategies.