CPG and E-Commerce. What company is winning?

For nearly a decade, CPG and e-commerce was a strategic priority for most firms. For years managers investigated the possibility of an entirely new channel-one with potentially higher margins than traditional brick-and-mortar retail. There were plenty of unknowns: How would this impact our main distribution channels? What about pack counts? How can you stimulate impulse purchases? How do you drive conversion without paying an arm and a leg for customer acquisition?

Consumer packaged goods companies invested millions of dollars on theoretical scenarios. Then overnight, things changed. CPG e-commerce was no longer a mythical goal; it was a revolution in real-time. The catalyst wasn’t a killer app or a perfectly designed marketing campaign. Rather, a global pandemic that upended life as we know it. Almost overnight, consumers gave up in-person shopping-replacing it with a mixture of online delivery or omnichannel. The pandemic fueled CPG e-commerce stats are pretty staggering.

From Boston Consulting Group:

The numbers reflecting the shift to e-commerce are dramatic: the use of online grocery services (across all fulfillment models) more than doubled from February to March 2020, from 13% to greater than 30% of US consumers, according to Brick Meets Click. And BCG analysis reveals that about 40% of these consumers are…