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.