Giant Eagle and PayPal: A more seamless grocery checkout experience

The Challenge

With a focus on serving its communities, supermarket chain Giant Eagle constantly seeks ways to save customers time and money. The retailer aimed to improve the ease and speed of checkout while enabling omnichannel shopping to keep up with a changing marketplace.

We spoke with Dan Magrish, Giant Eagle’s Senior Director of Gift Cards & Payments, and Jessica Shoben, Area Director of Pittsburgh South, about how PayPal helped improve the checkout experience.

The Solution

With PayPal, Giant Eagle found a way to outpace competitors in time-through-checkout, a key metric of customer service for the company. In 2022, Giant Eagle became the first supermarket to launch QR codes for PayPal and Venmo for in-store payments. “PayPal was an eager and willing partner to figure out how to bring in-store payments to life,” says Magrish.

Giant Eagle saw the opportunity to improve the in-store checkout experience by leveraging the trust and safety that PayPal has cultivated in online payments. Enabling checkout via Venmo, owned by PayPal, also resonates with a younger generation of shoppers in part by providing seamless access to curbside and omnichannel shopping.

“We have millennials who are getting into different shopping patterns,” says Shoben. “And having a partner like PayPal is going to help us keep those interactions as seamless as possible.”

The Results

Integrating PayPal and Venmo into the grocery checkout experience resulted in immediate benefits for Giant Eagle:

• Those paying with Venmo have the highest-value orders among all payment methods, on average*

• Customers using PayPal have the highest repeat buying rates

“How often a customer comes back is a great measure of how we’re doing in providing the service our customers need,” says Magrish.

Working with PayPal helps Giant Eagle ensure an excellent checkout process both in-store and online, thereby providing customers with the best shopping experience possible. “Safe, reliable, and flexible payments are what we want to offer to our guests,” says Shoben. “That’s really what it’s all about at the end of the day.

Watch the video and download the case study to learn how PayPal and Venmo help Giant Eagle improve the customer experience and contribute to repeat customers.