Abstract
The work herein deals with the impact of display share as a driver for private label sales in the online grocery retail setting. The research is motivated by preliminary evidence from QBerg, an Italian market intelligence firm specializing in online retail analytics, whose data reveal that although national brands largely outnumber private labels also in online assortments, private labels receive significantly higher average display visibility per brand. This suggests that online retailers may deliberately enhance the digital visibility of PLs, prompting the question of whether greater and deeper PL assortment share translates into higher PL sales share in the online environment, as established in traditional “brick-and mortar” retailers. Starting from the well-documented assumption that an increase in assortment share drives higher sales share in physical stores, we empirically test whether the same effect applies in the online channel. Our study uses a cross-sectional analysis based on secondary scanner data provided by Circana in Italy across 190 food and beverage categories and confirms the existence of a direct and robust relationship between private label online assortment and its sales share. Additionally, this relationship is found to be positively influenced by category assortment depth (used as a proxy for display share), a moderating factor that does not hold significance in the offline channel.