Until a couple of years ago, there were many who would have responded to the suggestion of shopping online for groceries with a “Why?”. Many of the same people today are likely to respond with a resounding “Why not!”. 

Online shopping had been catching on in India over the past decade or so, but it was during the Covid-19 pandemic that consumers fully realized the extent of convenience, accessibility, and reliability it offers and grew a preference for it. E-commerce and online delivery services served as a lifeline for millions of consumers by enabling safe, anytime purchase of essential commodities, hygiene products, and groceries. 

As per a recent Flipkart-Bain report, How India Shops Online 2021, "The grocery segment witnessed rapid growth during the pandemic – a trend that is likely to continue in the post-pandemic era, fueled by the choice, convenience, and affordability that e-commerce enables."

Today, e-commerce has reached almost all of India’s serviceable PIN codes, right from metro cities to remote locations like Tier-II and beyond. The e-commerce market is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 25-30 percent till FY26. Much of this growth will be led by small cities and towns, which account for four out of every five new shoppers. 

According to a RedSeer Consulting report, "More than half the grocery retail space in India is addressable by e-grocery platforms. Leading e-commerce companies are investing heavily in scaling up their grocery operations across the country, exploring new ecosystem partnerships, and strengthening their supply chains."

At the consumer-facing end, e-commerce companies are constantly innovating to improve the online shopping experience, right from product selection to payment. Many have introduced user interfaces and AI-enabled voice assistants that help customers discover and buy groceries, using their preferred language on the app. The choice of language is no longer limited to English, and now includes some of the most widely spoken Indian languages. To make online shopping even more convenient and affordable for customers, an increasing number of e-commerce players are offering a range of easy payment and credit options including no-cost EMI, “Pay Later EMI”, and more.

Such features have greatly enhanced the affordability and accessibility of e-commerce and developed a preference for online grocery shopping even among those users who are new to e-commerce or were earlier apprehensive of trying it. 

This trend was evinced during The Big Billion Days 2021 when consumers from about 200 new cities made grocery purchases on Flipkart for the first time. These are good signs and are indicative of a significant ongoing shift in the reason why consumers buy groceries online – while they earlier did it owing to lockdowns or the need for social distancing, they now do it because they have become used to the convenience and the quality it offers.

To ensure quick and timely delivery, e-commerce players that offer groceries are optimizing the delivery process from warehouses to customers’ homes with the help of preemptive, and data-backed planning. This also includes leveraging intelligent systems that use geocodes to plot the various delivery addresses on a map; determining the number of orders that go into each delivery van, the set of orders that will go in a batch, the sequence of deliveries, and the items to be packed together. There are also dashboards available on which all orders can be monitored and analyzed for future improvements. Stringent checks are conducted at various stages to ensure the integrity of products and their packaging. As a result, the groceries delivered to customers’ homes are fresh, hygienic, and in as good a condition as they would have been if the customer had hand-picked them. Taking the ease of shopping grocery online a notch higher, today consumers have an option to choose from quick deliveries for urgent grocery needs or bulk orders with greater savings for their monthly stock-up purchases.

Lately, with the introduction of groceries on social commerce platforms such as Shopsy, users can even combine orders for multiple individuals in their network of acquaintances and avail of a commission margin as well as significant savings on the cost of groceries. With e-commerce continuing to find innovative ways to create value for consumers, grocery shopping is undergoing a fundamental change that will meet our household needs and delight us every day.