Who said that consumers should choose between shopping online or visiting a store when buying groceries?

A growing number of Chinese retailers believe that one place can serve both types of purchases seamlessly, and they are investing heavily in technology to develop what they call “new retail”.

In Shanghai’s affluent Pudong district, the local branch of Hema Fresh illustrates this trend. This is a regular supermarket, where you can browse the shelves and pick up your favourite fruit, live crayfish or Kerrygold Irish butter.

But this location also acts as a warehouse for shoppers who are sending orders from their smartphone.

In fact, almost half of the customers choosing items from the shelves wear the store’s uniform.

They act as personal shoppers for online customers, filling their bags from the exact same choice offered to those customers who are physically present, and scanning products off their lists on digital handheld devices as they go along.

Once an order is ready, they hang up the bag on one of the conveyor belts that criss-cross the ceiling of the store and carry it to motorcyclists waiting to deliver food to all corners of the city on electric scooters.

The frontier between online and offline becomes even fuzzier when shoppers who did travel to the store take out their smartphone to pay or scan items on the shelf and find out more about their quality and origin, down to videos of the farmers and photos of the factories producing them. Conversely, many online customers have in fact visited the store before to see and touch the products they later order on their long commute through the sprawling city.

Online groceries sales are twice as common in China as they are in Europe, and these middle-class consumers are those who can afford the products we export there, such as Irish-made infant formula and now Irish beef.

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