Price Setting in Online Grocery Markets: The Case of Chocolate

Abstract

Online markets are developing rapidly in many industrialized countries and have already reached a rather mature status for some product categories. This, however, is not the case in the food sector. In Germany, the online food market captured still less than 1 % of total food sales in 2014. Despite this small share of the online market, the segment is clearly increasing and major players on the offline grocery market engage themselves on the online market, too, or they plan to do so. It is intended in this paper to contribute to our knowledge on competitive strategies of multichannel suppliers and pure online traders which are active on this growing market segment. A major element of competitive strategies on the online market for foods is pricing. We concentrate on pricing strategies of multichannel firms and pure online traders on the German online market and present evidence for the product group chocolate.