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Online grocery shopping has developed itself a lot over the past 10 years, and currently one of the most common ways to buy in France are called Drives, which means consumers buy online by choosing a location, most of the time the supermarket in their neighborhood, and instead of having it delivered at home they will go and pick it up directly from the shop without getting out of the car, like in a McDonalds drive-through.
Over the past few years, Drives in France have grown exponentially. It’s the distribution network that had the biggest impact with over 185 new openings since January 2020 for a total of about 5.200 drive locations.
The revenue from this channel is constantly growing as well and should reach over 9 billion Euros this year.
About half of french consumers are buying through this channel and Marie Cheval, former Digital transformation director at Carrefour is talking about how this is another french “speciality” such as Champagne, which is followed very closely by big groups such as Walmart, which are starting to import this trend to the US, just like what happened with french fries.
Why is the Drive so “à la mode” for french customers?
Why is the Drive gaining strength over delivery? Freedom and saving time are the main reasons for this success, even though Covid was also an undeniable accelerator.
Convenience is also one of the reasons because mainly people prefer to be able to get their groceries whenever they want instead of having to wait at home to receive their order.
Time management is then the first criteria in consumers' behaviour to choose their way of grocery shopping.
How are consumers buying in the french Drives?
Drives are part of a routine purchasing circuit, most drive buyers are young couples with babies or very young kids, according to a study conducted by the Market Research agency IRI. We can even see a peak on Wednesdays and Friday lunch breaks, when consumers go and pick up the delivery during or right after their working day.
When people shop online and then pick it up using Drives, they dedicate around 20 minutes, much longer than if they were to buy in a traditional brick and mortar store. The reason for this is that people are more relaxed behind their computer, so that they take more time to deep dive into the different categories and also they are checking the prices and product descriptions in much greater depth. That is why we can find quite a lot of drive price comparators online.
But the screen does not leave much space for improvisation, consumers are buying recurrent, rather than new products. The reason for this is that they are buying through their mobile phone, and images and titles are really important in the moment of choosing the right product.
Regarding expectations, consumers are waiting for less out of stock products. This is actually the first reason why brands are losing online sales, because 48% of the people do not buy a substitute product. Consumers wish also for different product assortments, with a greater variety of local products.
Last but not least, according to drive’s consumers are looking for the best offer: 40% are first heading to the promotion page, while 65% of them are clicking on the promo banners. This poses a challenge for brands investing in e retail media that will probably be interested in the future to measure the promos done online also according to the store locations.
Are Drives here to stay?
Other delivery services are also growing in France even though the turnover only represents 1 billion euros right now, about 8 times less than the drive channel. With the growth of Amazon Fresh in the FMCG industry and their very competitive offer and delivery service, french groups are speeding up the path in order to improve logistics and delivery costs and start to equip themselves with giant warehouses closer to big cities, in order to prepare orders.
Nevertheless, Drives in France show no sign of slowing down and brands are increasingly worried about measuring their online performance (and their Digital Shelf) across store locations.
Other trends are also coming up: for example ordering groceries by talking to a voice assistant or directly talking to a fridge, to be delivered at home or directly picked up by cars. Some of these services are already tested in France, but will they be adopted by french customers? And how will brands monitor all these new innovations? Questions to answer in the next article.
Sales Director Shalion France
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We at Shalion, developed a feature in our eCometry platform specifically to address this need: Geolocation. We are currently helping FMCG brands in different categories in France to accurately manage their product prices and assortment across hundreds of Postal Codes and e-retailers, so they don’t lose any single sales opportunity and increase their e-commerce results.
I’ll be happy to help you set up a monitoring system for your brand so contact me if you want to learn more.
