Aldi, Amazon & Co.: price-performance ranking 2022

Tiktok meets Aldi Süd

The “Elevator Boys” play in an Aldi promotional video on the Tiktok platform.

(Photo: Aldi Süd)

Cologne It was rather bad news that the US payment service PayPal recently drew attention to. At the end of 2021, the Californian financial services provider abolished the digital Moneypool collection box. In January, there were increasing reports of cyber fraudsters who wanted to elicit their account data from PayPal users, and the German Consumer Association also reported a sharp increase in consumer complaints for 2021.

The online marketplace Ebay turned away as a once loyal partner – and on top of that, Paypal shares also fell to a 12-month low earlier in the month. If PayPal were a buddy, he could use a few words of encouragement.

For example this: The confidence of consumers in Germany has apparently not been shaken by all the injustice. On the contrary. In the brand ranking for the best price-performance ratio, no other brand was able to improve as much as PayPal within a year. This is the result of a consumer survey by the opinion research institute Yougov.

The overall winner in the ranking was the discounter Aldi ahead of the drugstore chain dm. Lidl, another discounter, ranks third. Paypal made it to seventh place in the overall ranking.

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Paypal’s good performance goes hand in hand with the boom in online trading during the pandemic. “Consumers have reduced their reservations about payment services and have noticed that this type of payment is not a digital hurdle,” says Yougov study leader Felix Leiendecker. With Klarna, another digital payment service was able to advance to second place in the ranking of the strongest climbers.

Looking at the absolute values, Paypal and Klarna are ahead of the top-ranked bank ING in the overall ranking. The classic money houses generally have to contend with the digital competition. “In the same way that online banks have been steadily increasing their value for money over the past ten years, branch banks are sagging,” says Leiendecker. He sees the reason in the price awareness of consumers, who are critical of the fees charged by traditional banks.

Branch banks could score with advisory services, for example with larger financing issues. “But most consumers rarely ask for them.”

The steep rise of the fintechs, which also include Paypal and Klarna, is still unusual for Leiendecker. “Consumers build their judgment of value for money over many years,” he says. “Only drastic events such as the diesel scandal at Volkswagen can significantly change this in a short time.” As a new influencing factor, the corona crisis has apparently led to a rethink among many consumers in Germany.

A current study by management consultancy Roland Berger on trends in consumer behavior also points in this direction. A key finding: Above all, value for money has become more important in the eyes of consumers during the pandemic. In 2020, 58 percent of those surveyed said that this criterion would become more important for consumption after the Covid 19 crisis, and the following year it was 68 percent.

No other aspect was mentioned more often. Quality and price follow in second and third place. The quality criterion increased from 45 percent to 56 percent, while the importance of price stagnated. “Exclusivity and shopping experience are the key factors that lure consumers back into stores,” says Roland Berger partner Thorsten de Boer.

Supermarkets set the trends

Corresponding tendencies can also be felt in the food retail trade: quality is becoming more important to customers. This causes difficulties for discounters, their market share has been shrinking for years in favor of supermarkets. In 2019, the discounter share measured by sales volume was 44.9 percent, in the pandemic year 2020 it fell by 1.1 points to 43.8 percent.

“During the pandemic, when restaurants were closed, consumers’ awareness of the quality of food increased,” says Michael Gerling, Managing Director of the Research and Education Institute for Retail EHI in Cologne. In addition: “Because of the lower risk of infection, customers have primarily visited shops that carry all goods of daily use.”

However, this development could hardly shake customer judgments about the price-performance ratio of discounters. For many years, discounters have been at the forefront of customer favor with Yougov. “Brands like Aldi and Lidl feed on an image that has been built up over decades,” says EHI expert Gerling. Aldi Süd recently launched a campaign on the subject on the social media platform Tiktok with the “Elevator Boys” to reach a younger audience.

Gerling expects discounters to increase quality in order to grow again. “We’ve been watching a ping-pong game for years,” says Gerling. “Supermarkets are expanding their service, for example with baking stations or shelves for regional products. Discounters then follow up with similar offers, whereupon supermarkets in turn try to establish the old difference in quality with further innovations.”

At the moment, however, discounters are struggling to keep up. The EHI sees, among other things, the increased introduction of so-called self-service checkouts in supermarkets as a criterion for differentiation. According to an EHI survey, around every second customer in Germany is open to the new systems for self-checkout. “Many discounters don’t have the space to set up additional terminals,” says Gerling.

More: These brands always have more loyal customers

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