Absolutely! Since we started this journey, a key goal for us was to demystify this whole thing called eCommerce for our customers – viewing emerging technologies and capabilities through the eyes of a grocery merchant. You certainly don’t have to be a rocket scientist to get into eCommerce. But the technology curve is pretty steep and fast-paced. When you think about it, just six years ago, there was no such thing as YouTube, FaceBook or Twitter – and most of us were tethered to a wire if we wanted to get online. It used to be that we followed the Internet. Now it follows us!

There are some very valuable shoppers in the marketplace that would be amenable to online shopping if they had the opportunity. So I would highly encourage retailers to make eCommerce a strategic imperative – both in terms of merchandising and sales.

Very important. As background, offline grocery shopping can be a very redundant task. About 80% of the items in a typical shopping basket are bought every week. However, an effective online offering can actually leverage the redundancy of the task to grow both shopper loyalty and overall basket sales.

With that said, if the retailer doesn’t offer a loyalty card, ordering groceries online is can be a fairly painful transaction for the shopper. On the contrary, if the retailer has a loyalty card, they can build site functionality that leverages this data to allow the shopper only has to access their past purchases – enabling very quick repurchase transaction and significant opportunity for up selling.

Kraft Foods has an extensive library of recipe content. We’ve created functionality that enables this content to be placed on our retailers’ sites without creating more work for the retailer in terms of managing this content. We also have created click-to-buy functionality. In other words, instead of having to search for every one of the items in the recipe, the shopper just taps “click-to-buy” and the shopping basket is populated with the items in that recipe. The retailer targets the non-Kraft Foods items. Typically the retailer choose private label. This creates a true meal solution for the shopper and increases both private label and Kraft branded items sales.

When the recession hit, our retailers informed us that five-dollar dinners were a big hit. So we quickly retooled all our online merchandising to affordability bundles. For example, So we bundled our meal solutions and augmented them with email ads – offering “Dinner for $5” merchandising on very fast timing. They were extremely successful – so successful that we wound up providing them for all of our online retailers. They still do it today.