Decreasing Shopping Duration by Altering Choice Environments?

Boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic, the utilization of online grocery shopping has gained an increasing relevance over recent years. Increasing customer value by reducing friction can be a key option for online grocers to maintain and increase growth, customer loyalty and satisfaction. Being easy and inexpensive to implement, digital nudges can offer distinct benefits for consumers and online grocers. In this context, we investigated the potentials of digital nudging, using anchoring, social norms and a hybrid nudging concept as rational choice triggers. Our results indicate that anchoring and hybrid nudges have a significant effect on purchase frequency, while none of the investigated concepts is capable of reducing the overall shopping duration. Interestingly, in combination with anchoring nudges, social norms do have a significantly influential effect, although individually proven to be ineffective in low involvement decision contexts such as buying groceries online.