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Electronic Commerce Research

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08-04-2022

Consumer characteristics and e-grocery services: the primacy of the primary shopper

Author: Leo Van Hove

Published in: Electronic Commerce Research | Issue 2/2022

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Abstract

The literature does not agree on the precise role of socio-demographic characteristics in the adoption of online grocery shopping. This methodological note reviews the literature and shows that the differences in empirical results can to a large extent be explained by the data that is used. In particular, what matters is whether or not the survey that is exploited was targeted at the household member primarily responsible for the grocery shopping. I show that studies that use a non-targeted survey erroneously find that women are keener to adopt e-grocery services, in that the gender gap is simply due to women’s role as homemakers. I also show that such studies tend to underestimate the impact of education and income.

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The two selections overlap: all four papers mentioned by [2] are also listed by [1].

See [11], [12], and the references therein. This division of labour is also confirmed by several of the papers that are cited below.

Saphores and Xu [5, p. 4] mention that “by August 2018, of the 16% of US adults who had ever ordered groceries online, 7 out of 10 did so twice a month or less”.

In a Dutch study on the relationship between on-line and in-store shopping for non-daily products, Farag et al. [16] observe that women form the majority (61%) in their sample – even though in the first stage of the data collection households were selected randomly. Farag et al. explain this as follows: “A possible explanation […] is that shopping appeals more to women than to men. Hence, women would be more willing to fill out a questionnaire about shopping than men” [16, p. 130].

A search on “online grocery shopping” in Google Scholar yielded 5,460 hits.

A spreadsheet detailing all records, together with the reasons for their exclusion, is available from the author. Note that many records were excluded for more than one reason.

Conversely, [3] and [10] did not show up in the literature search. The former because they examine 14 different product categories (so that ‘grocery/ies’ does not appear in either title or abstract); the latter because it is a working paper. [2], [4] and [9] did show up but did not survive the selection process; see below.

A Mann–Whitney U test confirmed that the estimated impact of gender (coded as + 1, 0, -1) is significantly higher in studies that do not target primary shoppers (Md = 1, n = 7) than in studies that do (Md = 0, n = 10), U = 12.5, p = .05.

At 48.8% women, Hui and Wan [6] is a notable exception. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that respondents were questioned only about their intention to use. Perhaps male non-primary shoppers were thus less intimidated than in [7]; see Sect. 4.

[24, p. 62] and [28, p. 419–420] make similar remarks – for the case of Cyprus and the US.

There is another pattern in the literature. In line with the argument in the main text, studies that consider only users of e-grocery services (and that for this reason do not appear in Table 3) end up with samples that are dominated by women. An example is [29], for the case of Thailand, whose sample is 69.3% female.

Note that Jensen et al. [28, p. 424] report a mean variance inflation factor of 1.34, which”suggests no statistically problematic multicollinearity “. They do not, however, expound on any bivariate correlations.

Their paper was not selected in the systematic literature review because of their use of a stated preferences experiment rather than a straightforward survey.

Marcucci et al. [31, p. 5–6] claim that, compared to the Norwegian population, the coverage of their sample of 202 respondents is “quite good, especially in terms of gender distribution (approximately half women/men) and average monthly income”.

This is the explanation that they proffer: “It might be that households with higher income, prefer grocery stores and markets, which carry products in a higher price tier, which are not represented online” [27, p. 541].

Note that the cited studies do not provide an explanation for this finding.

Own calculations based on data made publicly available by [39]. Percentages do not sum up to 100 because of missing observations and “Doesn't apply to me” answers.

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12.

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Title: Consumer characteristics and e-grocery services: the primacy of the primary shopper
Author: Leo Van Hove
Publication date: 08-04-2022
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Electronic Commerce Research / Issue 2/2022
Print ISSN: 1389-5753
Electronic ISSN: 1572-9362
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-022-09551-x

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