The barcode scanner showed up in grocery checkouts in 1974. For decades, the checkout was the primary digital touchpoint between shoppers and grocery retailers.
Then the smartphone moved that relationship into the shopper’s pocket.What followed wasn’t a clean, orderly evolution. It was a series of bets, some that paid off, some that blew up publicly and a full rethinking of what it means to buy groceries in 2025.
THE APP ERA: LISTS, LOYALTY, AND THE FIRST REAL CHANNEL
The first wave of grocery apps wasn’t about checkout or delivery. It was about the shopping list.
Between 2010 and 2015, major retailers built apps that digitized what shoppers already did on paper: writing down what they needed, clipping coupons, checking prices. Not glamorous. But it trained consumers to open the retailer’s app before leaving the house.
Loyalty programs followed. The plastic card at the register migrated to the smartphone. Suddenly, retailers had a direct channel to the shopper: push notifications, personalized offers, purchase history. In 2019, Kroger launched Kroger Pay, combining payment, loyalty, and digital coupons into one experience on the phone. It was one of the first clear signals that the app wasn’t just a convenience feature. It was becoming the backbone of the customer relationship
SCAN & GO: THE CHECKOUT YOU CARRY IN YOUR CART
The idea was straightforward but required changing decades of behavior: shoppers scan items as they shop, pay from their phone before leaving, and never touch a register.
Sam’s Club had it running before anyone paid attention. When the pandemic hit in 2020, new users of its Scan & Go app grew more than fourfold in weeks. The technology hadn’t changed. Consumer behavior did, overnight, and the tech was already there.
Sam’s Club read that signal clearly. In 2025, Sam’s Club announced plans to remove traditional and self-checkout lanes across its nearly 600 clubs, making Scan & Go the centerpiece of its checkout strategy.The result: a 23% reduction in exit time per visit. In an Incisiv study cited by Grocery Doppio, 79% of retailers said frictionless checkout improved customer experience, while 58% reported lower front-end labor costs.
The model works because every visit becomes a logged event. Every scanned item is a data point. Every completed purchase is a behavioral signal the retailer can use to personalize the next visit.
THE OMNICHANNEL SHOPPER: THE 19% THAT DRIVES EVERYTHING
Omnichannel shoppers, those who have the retailer’s app, belong to the loyalty program, and engage digitally about six times per month, represent just 19% of customers. But they spend an average of $1,043 per month and generate 25.6% of total gross margin (Grocery Doppio, 2025).
That small group is a powerful signal of where digital investment can create value.
Online grocery sales in the U.S. hit $217 billion in 2025, projected to reach $893 billion by 2034 at over 17% annual growth (Market Data Forecast). Curbside pickup now outpaces same-day delivery: 31% of shoppers choose pickup versus 29% who choose delivery. And 84% of Gen Z shoppers already buy groceries online (FMI, 2024), For a generation that has grown up with digital shopping as a normal part of everyday life, mobile isn’t a new channel. It’s part of the expected experience
What they expect today becomes the standard tomorrow. Every week a retailer operates without that digital layer is a week a competitor spends building data, loyalty, and a gap that gets harder to close.
WHERE SHOCKOE FITS IN
The hardest part of building a grocery retail app isn’t the app. It’s everything behind it.
Most retailers already have a POS, inventory, loyalty, and commerce infrastructure in place. The challenge is making those systems work together in a way the shopper never has to think about. When you try to build a mobile experience on top of disconnected systems, the shopper feels every gap, an item that’s in stock on the app but not on the shelf, a loyalty discount that doesn’t apply at checkout, a Scan & Go flow that breaks under load.
We start with what you already have. Our job is to connect your existing POS, inventory, and loyalty systems into a single mobile layer that actually works as one. We build on the systems you already have, connecting the right data and services to create a more unified mobile experience without forcing a wholesale replacement of your existing infrastructure.
In practice, that means integrating your backend systems into a mobile experience that handles loyalty, payments, and Scan & Go from one app. It means surfacing inventory data from your existing systems so shoppers can see availability when and where it matters. And it means your team gets a clear picture of shopper behavior, what they buy, when, and how often, that you can act on.
The 19% of shoppers driving a quarter of your margin are not waiting. Neither should you.
FAQ
Where does a retailer start if they don’t have their own app yet?
Start with the customer relationship you already have. For many retailers, that means modernizing loyalty and building a useful digital account experience first: who buys what, how often, and how much. Scan & Go and personalized notifications build on top of that foundation. Starting with a cashierless checkout before having that base inverts the order and loses most of the value.
How does a regional retailer compete with Walmart or Amazon digitally?
With the advantage they already have: local knowledge. National chains have scale. Regional retailers can compete on relevance, community, and a deeper understanding of their shoppers. Technology isn’t the differentiator. What retailers do with their customer data is. A shopper who feels like their neighborhood store knows them better than Walmart will keep going back.
Is delivery or curbside pickup the better investment?
For many regional operators, curbside can be a more practical place to start. It grew faster than delivery from 2022 to 2024 and has already surpassed it in usage. Pickup also keeps the retailer closer to the customer relationship than a third-party marketplace does. And it builds loyalty in a way that third-party delivery platforms can’t, because on those platforms, the customer relationship belongs to the platform, not to you.
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Shockoe designs and builds mobile apps for retailers who want to turn digital experience into a real competitive advantage.
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