Frans Muller (Ahold Delhaize): “E-commerce makes customers more loyal”

By 2025, Ahold Delhaize‘s e-commerce business should be profitable, CEO Frans Muller claims. More importantly, though: online shopping will attract customers and make them more loyal.

Customer magnet

The online grocery market is still changing much faster than expected, Muller told Dutch business newspaper FD. The retailer wants to focus on click&collect customers: after all, profit margins on these are higher than on home deliveries. Partly for this reason, the group recently sold its New York-based online grocery delivery service FreshDirect to Getir.

E-commerce should be profitable for Ahold Delhaize by 2025, Muller says, but he adds that making a profit with online groceries is not an end in itself: “A very important function of e-commerce is to get those customers to come to you, make them more loyal.” He compares it to the function of a department like fresh fish in stores: it can sometimes be loss-making, but act as a magnet to attract customers.