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| Image Courtesy: http://www.preservationnation.org/ |
Supermarket items vary from other merchandise that can be bought online, such as books or music. A lot of these items can spoil or rot, so they have to be delivered as quickly as possible for reasons of freshness. Aside from this, supermarket products are considered “replacement items”. This means that the same item is more or less being bought regularly. Lastly, groceries are known as “high-touch” merchandise. It means that the customers prefer to analyze the items before buying them for purposes of quality.
Purchasing grocery product items over the Internet is still a lucrative and growing distribution channel. It employs direct access ways to let buyers shop from the comfort and safety of home and have their bought items delivered to them as quickly as possible. This is where the computer turns into the main form of communication. This system offers to chance for the customer to select and compare supermarket items in relevant and unique ways. As a result, the buyers have accepted this type of environment as a method of saving time and making their lives simple.
For the consolidators, the ongoing process shopping for groceries over the Internet will give them new applications for their research. These applications will help them come up with ways to improve on the existing system so they can further streamline the process of browsing and purchasing, and have the quality goods delivered to the customers at an even faster rate.
These research tools that have emerged from the system of buying online grocery product items are the result of connecting attitudinal data based on surveys and longitudinal transactional data at the single household level. This is good news for the consolidators since it will mean quick feedback from the consumer from a helpful sample, in a maintained environment. It also means that the consolidators have the opportunity to monitor the behavior of the consumers over time. Finally, these research tools can be a cost-effective and efficient form of analysis and data collection compared to the conventional survey research.
