Serving uncommitted customers

Giant Eagle is a food, fuel, and pharmacy retailer with 210+ grocery stores and 270+ GetGo fuel stations across five states. Like most retailers, Giant Eagle is interested in earning more share of wallet, consolidating visits from customers that spread their grocery and fuel trips around to multiple brands.  

Today’s consumers have a world of choices. Upside survey data shows that every month, grocery shoppers visit three different banners to make their purchases; fuel customers visit two gas stations; and c-store customers visit three different locations. No matter what you call these customers — secondary or tertiary, infrequent, irregular, lapsed, unengaged — there’s a growing segment of uncommitted customers in America. 

Uncommitted customers are defined by their willingness to shop around, and they are hard to win because they put their own value ahead of loyalty to any particular retailer or brand. But that doesn’t mean they’re impossible to win. Retailers just have to meet each of them where they want to be, and provide the value they’re looking for. Doing this well represents a big opportunity for retailers to grow year-over-year sales. 

Together with Upside, Giant Eagle sought to win more loyalty from its uncommitted customers. The goal is to get infrequent visitors to behave more loyally — making more visits to the grocery store or fuel station — and drive more engagement with Giant Eagle’s myPerks program.

Giving each customer what they need to choose Giant Eagle 

Giant Eagle and Upside partnered together to get nearby customers to choose its stores and stations more often, shifting visits away from competitors not on the platform.

Before introducing Upside: 

• Roughly 20% of Giant Eagle grocery customers were “moderately loyal,” making an average of three trips per month in-store. 
• Roughly 7% of GetGo fuel customers were “moderately loyal,” making an average of one trip per month on-site. 

Even for the customers who were already in their “most loyal” group, there were opportunities to win — like moving from the pump to the c-store, or putting more in their grocery cart.  

To motivate these “moderately loyal” customers to skip their other stops and go to Giant Eagle sites more often than usual, Upside introduces personalized cash back promotions to change their buying behavior. 

Upside’s digital marketplace connects Giant Eagle locations with tens of thousands of nearby customers using the Upside app to decide where to buy. The fact that these promotions are “personalized” means that the offers are unique and highly relevant to individual customers, helping them overcome the friction that prevented them from buying more from the retailer in the first place. That amount differs for every person — Upside finds that amount and ensures they are margin-bound and profitable for the retailer. That way Giant Eagle is able to give each customer what they need to choose their locations. 

To validate Upside’s impact, Giant Eagle completed its own independent analysis based on nine months of transaction data, measuring its Upside users against control shoppers for each relevant month.  

Here’s what we found.