Going Online for Groceries: Drivers of Category-Level Share of Wallet Expansion

Some grocery product categories may be more successful than others in terms of stimulating consumers to increase their share of wallet (SoW) when they start buying through the online channel of a grocery chain. This study explores the circumstances in which online and multichannel marketing mix instruments determine the extent of category-level SoW expansion. To do so, the authors use U.K. household scanner panel data, covering online and offline purchases by 3,311 households in 59 categories of four multichannel retail chains. The results indicate that the effectiveness of online and multichannel marketing mix instruments for stimulating expansion is moderated by category characteristics, such that a selective approach to making decisions about the online price, online assortment breadth, online/offline assortment integration, and online national brand proliferation, tuned to account for category differences, can increase category-level SoW for the online-visited chain.