According to a new study by Dansk Erhverv, the Danish Chamber of Commerce, online shopping in the country has grown by 75% in the last five years.
The study shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this growth, and it does not appear to be reversing.
Dansk Erhverv Study
Over the last five years, the proportion of Danish consumers who shopped online for everything from milk to nappies and potatoes has grown by 75%, with consumers buying more groceries and meal boxes than ever before.
According to Dansk Erhverv, Danish consumers have enjoyed significantly better opportunities to shop for groceries and meal boxes online, and are increasingly taking advantage of it.
Niels Ralund, e-commerce director at Dansk Erhverv, said, "The development has been positive for a long time, but in recent years and especially during the coronavirus crisis, there has been really significant progress.
"It is also connected with the fact that in recent years many more players have been added, so that you can now have groceries and meal boxes delivered to your door all over the country."
Reasons that led Danish consumers to embrace e-commerce include the opportunity to save time and avoid a trip down to the supermarket.
It is also connected with the overall trend on the web, Ralund noted and added, "It is about making everyday life easier, and many believe that it will be if you avoid the queue in the supermarket and instead have the goods delivered directly to your door. In general, we can see that convenience fills more and more for consumers, while the importance of price becomes less."
E-Commerce Trends
Consumers engaging with online shopping the most include families with children. The study found this subsection to be the most frequent users of digital grocery stores, while older consumers were a little more reluctant. Among younger consumers, meal boxes were as popular as groceries.
The study also found that the inability to touch the goods contributed to the reluctance among certain consumers to adopt online shopping.
For example, shoppers are turned off by not being able to check the ripeness of fruit.
Describing this issue as, "a nut that is unbelievably difficult for the stores to crack," Ralund added, "Even though they repeatedly top the list of user satisfaction and willingness to recommend, it's just hard to remove that skepticism."
However, e-commerce is still forecast to have a solid future, as, among those who already shop for groceries/meal boxes online, just under one in four will shop more or much more, while just over one in ten expect to turn down shopping in the next 12 months.
"The figures have always shown that once you have tried to buy groceries online, the vast majority will continue. The growth will probably not be as great as during the corona crisis, but I am convinced that we will not see a decline in digital grocery sales, even though the restrictions in the physical stores are largely gone," Ralund said.
© 2021 European Supermarket Magazine. Article by Conor Farrelly. For more Technology news, click here. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
