The game is changing with Skroutz entering the supermarket market

Within two months, the largest online sales platform in Greece, launched the product category "supermarket" through its cooperation with My Market and the online supermarket e-fresh. In this way, the platform now has its own share in this sector and the two supermarkets gain access to a pool of hundreds of thousands of customers.

In a pioneering move for that time, George Hadjigeorgiou, George Avgoustidis and Vassilis Dimos created a product search and price comparison engine in 2005, laying the foundations for a market that would boom in a few years and acquire several subcategories. In the midst of successive crises, Skroutz quintupled its turnover from 2011 to 2016 from 1.5 million euros to 7.5 million euros and continued to evolve into a marketplace, constantly growing in size.

Stepping into food delivery

The arrival of players from abroad and acquisitions in the industry has spurred the need for food delivery in the domestic market. Having its own delivery experience and facing e-food and Wolt, Skroutz made its own move in September 2019 by launching Skroutz Food, an online food ordering service that started to be available in most of Attica region, including more than 1,000 restaurants and coffee shops.

The following year, however, saw Skroutz divest, deciding to sell Skroutz Food to OTE Group, to be integrated into the corresponding platform owned by the country's largest telecoms group, BOX.

The supermarket factor

The pandemic brought the platforms into a dialectical relationship with large retailers and supermarkets who urgently sought to build their own network to reach as many new customers as possible. e-food, Wolt, BOX, Instashop partnered with supermarket chains, providing last mile services or even "pinning" their own basket on their own platforms, facilitating the operation of the supermarkets' massive infrastructure and multi-channel operations.

Despite the inglorious end of its food delivery venture, Skroutz did not remain uninvolved in the developments even when consumers started to return to physical retail. It leveraged its penetration and brand awareness in the market and with consumers to make new partnerships in the food sector, this time launching a series of partnerships with supermarkets to distribute their products, but not to deliver them.

The start of this year saw Skroutz Points smart lockers being installed in Masoutis stores in Athens and Thessaloniki, in a first step for Skroutz to approach organised retail in its own way.

In August, Skroutz launched a partnership with My Market, with the supermarket basket having a presence on the platform, where consumers can buy the products they want online. The 7,671 products are currently available for areas in Athens and Thessaloniki, with potential for gradual growth. The minimum order is 25 euros, the delivery value at 2 euros, while deliveries are free for orders over 59 euros.

The addition of e-fresh

Now, next to the My Market basket, the only online supermarket in Greece, e-fresh, has been added, contributing to the creation of a new product category for Skroutz, that of the supermarket. Skroutz users have the possibility to place their order through its platform, but its execution and delivery is carried out by e-fresh, for the time being exclusively in Attica. The minimum order is 25 euros, the delivery value at 2 euros, while deliveries are free for orders over 100 euros.

Dynamic market

The entry into the sale of supermarket products seemed inevitable for the largest e-sales platform in Greece. And not without reason.

Figures from Skroutz's "The power of e-commerce" conference last March showed that by 2026, one in four retail sales will be made online, while by 2040 it is estimated that 95% of all purchases will be made online. This development has led the leading marketplace in Greece to invest in all types of payments and even through different ways.

It is a given that Skroutz's entry into the supermarket market changes the balance since the platform already has the customers and can add sales in a category with huge turnover. And this will affect the other "players", either retailers or platforms like efood. Skroutz has estimated that in 2023 the customer base of unique users making a purchase will grow from 1.6 million to 2 million, so obviously it already has a 2,000,000 customer base ready to potentially buy. And therefore this development may remove sales from other platforms or even move customers from other retailers to My Market primarily and e-fresh complementarily.

Global e-commerce spending will exceed $1 trillion in 2022, growing 21% year-on-year, according to global media measurement and analytics company Comscore. This is the best year of digital commerce ever, and 2023 is expected to be a landmark year for online retail, thanks to the integration of new technologies into every facet of e-commerce.