With consumers worldwide social distancing in response to the coronavirus, grocers are experiencing record-breaking online sales, online grocery app downloads, and orders for delivery, curbside, and buy online pick up in-store.
Until recently, grocery retailers perceived e-Commerce as a driver of net-new topline growth at the cost of profitability in an already low-margin industry. Thus, grocers have lagged behind other retail verticals in deploying e-Commerce platforms and executing omnichannel strategies. Many people are buying groceries online for the first time, and analysts predict that the adoption of online grocery shopping will continue to increase long-term as new shopping habits form.
Mi9 grocery retail customers in North America, Canada, and Europe have experienced exponential e-Commerce growth over the last few days. A leading European grocery retailer, who recently implemented the cloud-based Mi9 Digital Commerce Platform, saw a 2400% increase in concurrent site traffic (users on the site at the same time) and successfully supported this influx of traffic. The grocer typically experiences traffic of 500 concurrent users on its website and this number jumped to 12,000 concurrent users within one day and has maintained this heightened level.
The dramatic increase in concurrent site traffic and the boost of online orders were manageable only due to the cloud-based deployment of the Mi9 Digital Commerce platform. One of the many benefits of the Mi9 Cloud is the ability to automatically scale up and down to accommodate spikes in demand without downtime.
The anticipated growth in the adoption of online grocery shopping underscores the importance of having the flexibility to orchestrate demand independently of the selling channel and the ability to scale instantaneously to support unprecedented demand. An e-Commerce presence is now table stakes for grocers.
