Every year Shopfully (formerly Offerista), a drive-to-store company, publishes a study about how Austrians shop, and every year the trade press reads it the way the company wants it read: the store is alive, omnichannel is the future, invest in both. The 2026 edition landed on 27 May. The headline is that 93 percent of Austrians now inform themselves online before they enter a shop, while 60 percent still buy predominantly in the shop itself. The reflex reads it as stores still matter. That is the wrong reading.
The number that matters is the first one, and its trajectory. The same series put online-before-store research at 86 percent in 2025, up five points on the year before, ahead of a European average of 82. Run the line back and the 2024 reading sits around 81 percent (an estimate; the earlier wave reported the change, not the level). Eighty-one, eighty-six, ninety-three. The decision has been migrating online at an accelerating rate, and it is now almost universal.
Where the purchase closes has barely moved. Food and drink is the most stubbornly in-store category in the entire survey: 97 percent of Austrians buy it in a physical shop (EU 96 percent), the highest of any category measured. So two things are true at once, and the study sells the comfortable one. The comfortable truth: the register is still in the shop. The structural one: the decision is no longer made there.
For a conventional grocer this is a footnote. The floor is theirs; the trip ends there regardless of where it was decided. And it is not only an Austrian pattern: the German cut of the same study, released a day later, shows the same shape, 54 percent of Germans researching online always or often before they shop and 97 percent still buying food in the shop, the German country head putting it plainly: stationary retail stays central, but the purchase decision is increasingly prepared digitally. For a Bio delivery network this is the whole game. It has two sides.
The bad news first, because it is real but narrower than it looks. The bottleneck is channel size: online is still a small slice of DACH retail (Germany sits at 13.4 percent of total retail, grocery online a low-single-digit fraction of food), and food is the most stationary category in the survey at 97 percent in-store. Anyone selling “buy your groceries online” as a mass behaviour is fighting that. What is not true is that Bio resists the online channel; the opposite holds. Inside the online grocery channel that does exist, Bio massively over-indexes: organic revenue shares at the delivery services run to 28 percent at Tegut, 26 at Knuspr, 20 at Rewe, roughly three times Bio’s share of the total food market. The honest bear case is not that Bio swims against the current; inside delivery, Bio is the current. The wall is the size of the channel, not Bio’s position within it. Early 2026 confirms both halves: Bio e-commerce still growing double-digit, yet only about 5 percent of where Bio actually sells. Small channel, fast growth, at the same time.
The good news is that nobody has to move the whole category online. The leverage is not in the channel but in the decision, and that is no longer made in the store. For nearly everyone in the category, intent now forms on a digital surface before anyone touches a shelf or packs a crate. The question stops being online or stationary and becomes who owns the pre-purchase surface for Bio. Whoever owns where the trip is decided shapes the trip, no matter where it ends.
This is not a theory the study would dispute. It is the business the study’s author is in. The Austrian country manager put it plainly on release: classic loyalty to a retailer is fading, and what decides the purchase now is relevance, price-value and digital visibility along the buying decision. The same study shows the behaviour underneath that claim: 53 percent of Austrians actively reach for discounted products, 45 percent split their basket across several retailers to chase the best offers, and 57 percent will switch their usual retailer outright for a good enough deal. Translated out of the sales register: the pre-purchase surface is where price, availability and intent get fixed, the buyer is loyal to the offer rather than the shop, and producers already pay to be present on that surface.
That is the same pattern the Observatory has been tracking from the producer side under a different name. A producer who pays to be visible at the moment of decision is paying for the decision surface, not for the shelf. In the Bio delivery channel, that surface is the operator’s. The shelf is downstream and largely settled. The surface is upstream, digital, and genuinely contested: every retailer is building its own walled garden, most lack the market power to set a standard, and the measurement layer (attribution, metrics, auction logic) is still immature. That fragmentation is the catch in “own the surface”; no single small player can. It is also, precisely, the opening for a neutral cross-retailer measure that belongs to none of the gardens. And the demand side is already there: roughly four in ten Austrians will hand a retailer their data in exchange for better offers, only about a third refuse outright. The data-for-value exchange the producer-pays model assumes is not hypothetical. It is measured.
There is a caveat worth stating, because the Observatory does not launder vendor numbers. The ROPO line (Research Online, Purchase Offline) is the strongest part: 81 to 86 to 93 is the same instrument across three years, and it is the figure to trust. The softer reading is the 60 percent who buy predominantly in-store, best understood through what moved underneath it: pure-online buyers in Austria collapsed from 13 to 2 percent year-on-year while hybrid shoppers rose from 33 to 37. That is not a return to the shop; it is the online-only shopper disappearing into the hybrid mode, where the decision is digital and the pickup physical. The instrument also surveys ages 25 and up, under-weighting the youngest, most online-first cohort; if anything it understates the migration.
The instruments at this Observatory point at the producer side of this surface. The consumer study points at the same surface from the other end. The shop keeps the register. It lost the decision a while ago, and the only open question is who furnishes the room where the decision now happens.
Apparatus: Consumer figures from The State of Shopping 2026*, Shopfully (formerly Offerista) (opens in new tab), Austrian release 27 May and German release 28 May 2026 (the same instrument: 6,605 respondents aged 25+, eight European countries, fielded Q1 2026); the 2024 ROPO reading (roughly 81 percent) is an estimate back-calculated from the 2025 wave. Bio channel mix and over-indexing figures from BÖLW / Arbeitskreis Biomarkt (Branchenreport 2026 and the Q1/2026 release); German channel size from the HDE Online-Monitor 2025; Austrian macro context from Handelsverband and RegioPlan. The over-indexing claim carries its own ceiling: independent analysis (Peer Schader, Supermarktblog, 2026) shows the basket-share figures running well ahead of revenue share. No figures are invented; the single estimate is flagged inline.*