For decades, the grocery checkout lane was the home of impulse shopping with carefully curated displays of gum, candy and salty snacks tempting even the most health- or budget-conscious consumers as they waited in line to pay. But what happens when more of the shopping journey shifts online and consumers become more deliberate about what they buy as they watch their budgets and waistlines?
At first glance, the outlook appears grim for the spontaneous candy bar, bag of chips or sweet treat tossed into the shopping cart at the last minute.
For example, a recent pulse survey by Relex Solutions found 46% of 1,000 consumers in the US and UK cut back on snacks and junk food due to higher grocery prices. Likewise, a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research found households with at least one GLP-1 user cut their grocery spending by 5.3% within six months of beginning the medication, with the heaviest cuts concentrated on calorie-dense, processed categories, including a 10.1% drop in savory snack purchases. As for the impact of e-commerce on spontaneous shopping, NielsenIQ research shows consumers are about half as likely to make an impulse snack purchase online as in brick and mortar stores, even as online sales accounted for nearly three-quarters of all CPG dollar growth in 2025.
Taken together, those trends have fueled predictions that impulse shopping is in decline.
But according to NielsenIQ Director of eCommerce Thought Leadership Jack O’Leary, impulse food purchases aren’t disappearing – but they are evolving.
In this episode of FoodNavigator-USA’s Soup-To-Nuts Podcast, O’Leary explains how social commerce, digital merchandising, faster fulfillment and AI-powered recommendations are creating new opportunities to capture spontaneous purchases, even as consumers become more intentional about what they buy.
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Is impulse shopping really disappearing?
Before brands and retailers can take advantage of new impulse opportunities, O’Leary says they need to understand how the landscape is changing – including emerging challenges and shifting consumer attitudes.
“There are definitely some headwinds out there. Consumers are a little bit more discerning around their budget, discerning around what ingredients and products they want to eat or put into their bodies, and then also, more consumers are increasingly shopping in digital environments, e-commerce, online platforms, and that’s a particularly difficult space for the industry to try to drive greater impulse purchase behavior,” he said
He explained that NIQ research shows online CPG sales in the US are outpacing total CPG growth by four times with the online sales growth rate up 14.8% in 2025 over the previous year and total CPG sales growth rate up only 3.7% in the same period. That means online sales represented about 74.2% of total CPG dollar growth, according to NIQ data.
Despite strong e-commerce growth, O’Leary says shoppers don’t think of online first for snacking. Rather, NIQ data shows 47% of consumers think grocery is the best retailer for buying snacks. This is far higher than the 11.5% who said the same about buying snacks online.
E-commerce also faces a basket-building challenge, according to NIQ data, which shows the average units per occasion for in store is 8.4 versus 5.2 for online. Likewise, the units per occasion for grocery stores is 11.3 compared to just 2.8 for Amazon.
When it comes to impulse shopping for snacks, NIQ data shows that 21.6% of impulse purchases occur in stores verses 10.7% online.
As for the impact of GLP-1 use on impulse sweets and snack purchases, O’Leary said many people still want sweet treats, a small reward or something that feels fun and spontaneous in the moment – but they might opt for smaller pack sizes.
“I would argue that this isn’t a destruction or a complete loss of impulse,” he added. “This is an opportunity to reimagine what impulse really is.”
Emerging channels and paths to purchase impulse products
One of the biggest – and most overlooked – opportunities that O’Leary says he sees for impulse purchases is on social media.
“Social media is increasingly making itself more commercially oriented. Platforms like TikTok Shop are highly shoppable, and other social media platforms push shoppers to quickly make a purchase on online platforms like Amazon or Walmart.com,” he said. “So there is an opportunity in other channels to take up some of this slack and actually drive increasing impulse purchases through the power and inspiration of social media as kind of the catalyst and starting point.”
While social media marketing can be a powerful sales and awareness driver, it can also harm brands if executed poorly, warns O’Leary.
He says unlocking the power of social media to drive impulse purchases requires authentic communication and positioning products as a solution to a real pain point for consumers.
Beyond leveraging social media, brands must master what O’Leary calls “digital shelf fundamentals” in order to effectively capture impulse purchases across other e-commerce channels.
“The digital shelf has some unique attributes and differences from the physical shelf that you must get right as a brand in order for your product to be available, visible, and something that the shopper wants to convert on,” he said.
“You need to make sure that you’re taking advantage and utilizing all of the product image slots, that those images are clear and up to date, and evoke either lifestyle imagery or something about the product that makes the shopper want to transact. You need to make sure that your products are visible in search. So that might be optimizing your product titles or bidding on certain certain keywords,” he explained.
While basic, he warns, brands that don’t master these elements will not capture their fair share of the market.
AI: The next frontier in online shopping
Further complicating discovery online is the rising role of algorithms that influence which social media posts surface on consumers’ feeds and AI agents as shopper assistants. While these are still emerging areas with black box elements, O’Leary says strong digital shelf fundamentals and clear communication across online elements can help.
“Having the right products available with good content, good ratings and reviews, a great price point – all of that will actually be valued very highly by these AI assistants, these AI algorithms in these early years of kind of building out which products are recommended,” he explained.
Additionally, he said, agents seek “good sources of truth,” such as blog posts or company websites, that may feel like outdated modes of communication but which now have renewed relevance.
Faster delivery bolsters online impulse shopping
Inspiring consumers to spontaneously add a product to their digital cart is only half the battle – the other is delivering it to them quickly, which is an area that O’Leary acknowledges has historically been a challenge for online shopping, but which he says retailers are improving.
“One of the other challenges e-commerce has had forever is the product doesn’t get to me fast enough. Well, countless retailers, online platforms are building out business models that can fulfill e-commerce orders in an hour or less, 30 minutes or less,” which place delivery within the realm of satisfying impulses, he said.
He also noted that delivery intermediaries such as Uber or DoorDash give consumers an option to add a second stop for their drivers to pick up impulse items. Likewise, many platforms now have a push notification to ask consumers if they want to add a specific item to their order.
Digital marketing’s halo effect
Investments in e-commerce and digital marketing can benefit brands and retailers even if they don’t result in immediate online sales, according to O’Leary who says the influence of digital shopping shapes what consumers ultimately buy when they visit a brick-and-mortar store.
“Online share of sales is growing every single year in across a lot of categories, and online exclusive sales are growing faster than in-store sales, but online also has a halo impact on the majority of sales and snacking categories that occur in store. More than half of your consumers in aisle have been influenced in some way or another, whether consciously or subconsciously, by a digital touchpoint on their way to make that purchase in store, and so by having a consideration for what’s going online, you’re helping your in-store model as well,” he said.
He added: “This is to say fear not, in-store purchases still play a valuable role in every consumer’s kind of range of where they’re buying products from, but do still consider online. Don’t abandon it, because online is having a distinct impact on the behavior you’re seeing in aisle at the checkout in store, and is influential there. We call it a halo effect for a reason.”
As O’Leary makes clear, reports of impulse shopping’s demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated. While inflation, health priorities and GLP-1 medications are changing what consumers buy and how they shop the desire for spontaneous discovery hasn’t disappeared.
Instead, impulse shopping is becoming an omnichannel experience, shaped by social media, digital merchandising, AI recommendations, fast fulfillment and, ultimately, purchases that may happen online and in store.
For brands and retailers, success will depend less on owning the checkout lane than on showing up at the right moment, wherever consumers are on their shopping journey.
