Online grocery shopping statistics

Most online grocery shopping statistics come from one of two places. Federal data from the Census Bureau counts sales reported by employer businesses. Industry trackers survey shoppers about what they bought. Our earlier post on small-batch goods from makers nationwide touched on online grocery shopping statistics in passing. This one goes to the sources.

The Census Bureau's Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales report for the second quarter of 2026, first released August 18, 2026, put total US retail e-commerce at $340.2 billion, 17.1 percent of all retail sales after seasonal adjustment. E-commerce grew 12.2 percent from a year earlier while total retail grew 6.7 percent. The bureau counts a sale as e-commerce when the order is placed or the price is negotiated online, whether or not payment happens online.

Grocery shows up in a supplemental table that splits e-commerce by type of store. Food and beverage stores reported $10.34 billion of e-commerce in 2Q 2026, up from $9.56 billion in 2Q 2025, a gain of about 8.1 percent by our math. That row covers supermarkets, specialty food stores and beer, wine and liquor stores. A grocery order placed with a warehouse club or an online-only retailer is filed under that seller's own category.

The annual numbers show the 2020 jump plainly. Food and beverage store e-commerce nearly tripled from 2019 to 2020 and kept climbing more slowly after that. The same survey's merchandise-line tables add the other half of the picture: electronic shopping and mail-order houses sold $36.6 billion of food, beer and wine online in 2022, up from $16.6 billion in 2019. That online retailer figure is larger than the store figure.

Brick Meets Click has run its Grocery Shopper Survey every month since March 2020. It asks US adults who shop for their household's groceries what they bought online and how, then weights the answers. The December 2025 wave drew 1,488 responses. It is the most frequently updated source for online grocery statistics, and it is still a survey, so read each month as an estimate.

Growth swings from month to month. September 2025 came in up 31 percent from a year earlier, while October 2025 rose 10.5 percent. The longer view matters too. For all of 2023, the survey put online grocery sales at $95.8 billion, down 1.2 percent from 2022. Every 2025 month shown in the chart above grew by double digits from a year earlier.

The same survey breaks online grocery sales into three ways of getting the order: delivery (by a retailer or a service such as Instacart or Shipt), grocery pickup at the store and ship-to-home by a parcel carrier such as FedEx, UPS or USPS. In 3Q 2026, delivery grew more than 30 percent and accounted for about three-quarters of all online grocery growth. Pickup grew in the mid-single digits. Ship-to-home grew slightly slower than the 20.7 percent total.

That 2023 split has since turned over. In August 2025, delivery made up 45 percent of online grocery sales after a 30 percent jump from a year earlier, ship-to-home rose 19 percent, and pickup sales fell 4 percent and lost more than 6 points of share. The 3Q 2026 release says delivery gained another 5 points of share over the past year.

Put together, the online grocery growth story is about habit. Households order more often, many mix methods in the same month, and in-store grocery sales slipped from a year earlier in 3Q 2026 according to the same release. The Census retail ecommerce data points the same way at a broader level, with ecommerce sales across all retail growing almost twice as fast as total retail in 2Q 2026.

Reach keeps widening as well. The 3Q 2026 release counted nearly 64 percent of US households as monthly active online grocery shoppers in September 2026, a record for the survey, and almost 62 percent across the quarter as a whole. Some 81 percent of households have bought groceries online at least once.

Grocery ecommerce at the scale of these numbers is built around supermarket baskets, fresh produce and fast delivery windows. Small food makers sell into a narrower slice, closer to the ship-to-home channel: shelf-stable goods packed and mailed by the business that made them.

LocalCart works that way. Each maker ships its own products, so a cart with items from two makers shows two shipping charges at checkout, with rates calculated for your address. LocalCart does not run a local delivery service, its terms do not guarantee same-day shipping, and nothing on the site offers refrigerated shipping. The store sells pantry goods, sauces, preserves, snacks and drink kits, and no fresh produce, meat, dairy or bread. Checkout takes Stripe or PayPal, works without an account and lists the United States and the US Virgin Islands as ship-to countries.

Three examples from different makers. Pasta Lab's box holds four 12 oz bags of dried pasta that need no refrigeration and are best used within 6 months. Rosie's Kettle Corn in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, lists its ingredients as popcorn, corn oil, sugar and salt. Vesta Kitchen in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, makes Sunday Kind of Love, a tomato sauce in a 16 fl oz jar.