Got Milk? New Research from Salsify and Vizit Finds Product Details Dramatically Impact Online Grocery Purchase Decisions

Product ManagementProductivity & EnablementSales & Marketing

By STS News Desk On Sep 29, 2021

New Salsify Research: Poor Quality Product Pages Result in Nearly Half of Shoppers Abandoning In-store and Online Purchases

From milk in your cereal to 4.7-star rating averages, Product Page Benchmarks for Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, and Target reveal what top-performers have in common

Salsify, the Commerce Experience Management (CommerceXM) platform empowering brand manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to win on the digital shelf, and Vizit, a visual brand performance platform, announced the findings ofWinning Elements of Grocery Product Pages: Benchmarks for Amazon, Kroger, Target, and Walmart. This research, conducted from January through July of 2021, analyzed the top and bottom performers across 100,000 live grocery product detail pages on four retail giants.

Online grocery sales grew 54% in 2020 and are expected to exceed $187 billion by 2024, which is forcing brands to dramatically rethink digital shelf strategies to capture their share of this market. The report identifies specific steps and recommendations based on what grocery items shoppers click and buy on Amazon, Kroger, Target, and Walmart ecommerce sites.

Key findings include:

Content and media matters: Leading brands supply retailers with more content and leverage rich media and branding tactics to win sales and achieve better conversion rates. Photos of milk being poured into a bowl of cereal convince more consumers to purchase cereal than more generic photos.
Customer reviews drive sales: Brands in the top ten percent of listings have 80x the reviews as the lowest-performing products in their category.
Images help inspire sales: Winning brands have 2-3x the number of images than the lowest performers. For example, most leaders on Amazon and Walmart have 6 or 7 images per product.
Don’t skimp on the details: Leading brands’ product description lengths are often 5-10 times longer than the low performers on the same site.
Spread out the snacks: Fanned formation for snack bags and keywords and images that reinforce portability, “on-the-go,” “school backpack,” “on a hike.”
Preparing the meat: A category where brands have lots of opportunity to provide more content, lengthen descriptions and provide more enhanced content. Meat pictured on wooden cutting boards or on deli paper where it is layered does very well.
Quench the thirst: Beverages are among the most colorful categories, fresh fruit, rockstar, or neon coloring with noticeable drop shadows or multi-can packaging.

“For grocery brands, product pages must serve the entire customer buying journey,” said Cara Wood, Director of Brand Journalism, Salsify. “This research demonstrates that the details matter, from selecting the right photography to the product descriptions to quality user reviews. The right digital experiences increasingly power all aspects of commerce.”

“People shop with their eyes, and images are some of the most effective sales tools brands have along the path to purchase,” said Jehan Hamedi, CEO of Vizit. “To stand out and win on the digital shelf, companies need to optimize visual content and harness the power of their imagery to drive commerce with online consumers.”

There is a natural correlation between the time and investment a retailer has made in ecommerce and the robustness of the product detail pages. Amazon and Walmart have had dedicated grocery digital teams since 2006 and 2007, respectively. Target’s ecommerce push for groceries came in 2014, and Kroger started in 2014 and recently increased investments in 2018. As more grocery shoppers rely on what they find online to shop, retailers newer to the ecommerce space are watching the tactics of early adopters. Shoppers choose based on convenience and available information. For example, 53% of shoppers ranked “quality of images and product descriptions online” as one of their top 3 most important factors when choosing where to shop, according to Salsify’s 2021 Consumer Research Report.

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