Online grocery shopping is grabbing the attention of many consumers who remain updated with the latest technological innovations. Grocers have started providing their services online to cater these techy users. However, as the grocery products hold perishable nature, few challenges are likely to arise. It becomes difficult to operate online grocery stores against any other e-commerce stores like apparels, electronics, furniture, accessories or other such products.
This post will help you to plan and strategize your online grocery business and run it more successfully.
Most of us are aware of the basics of online business. To start with, you need to create a marketplace where items are displaced for customers which can be selected and further delivered at their doorsteps. In this transaction, the critical factor is to manage tie-ups with local grocery stores and on time delivery of the products as expected by customers. If you have a smooth process and sufficient workforce especially for delivery than there is no hindrance scheduled to come your way.
Of course, your business model plays an essential role in establishing online grocery startup. However, the initial impression is dependant on your website. It is the center point of interaction between you and your buyers, engaging them and offering exclusive service allure them into loyal customers. Therefore, the first thing you need to take care of your website is it should load quickly, navigate easily and mobile friendly. Apart from this, the other unique features include:
Save Orders
Grocery items are such things which people shop at regular interval. Many customers have same orders every month. To complement such behavior, there should be an option on the website to save the current order. So when they come next time, they just need to select ‘reorder’ without selecting each item from the list and adding it to the cart.
Cart Share
Shopping for home includes all the items from the family members. Same is with Grocery shopping; different members want to buy various items of their choice. A feature of sharing the cart with other users will attract and delight more customers. All the family members can add additional products in the order and get them through a single order process.
Recipes and their Ingredients
This feature will act as a topping for the cake providing additional value to the customers. Add some recipes on your website with photos or videos and suggest them the ingredients used in that recipes redirecting them to the product pages. It will surely grab the customer’s attention and help in engaging them to buy more products on the website.
Coupons Codes and Discounts
Most of the e-commerce site has a feature of providing a discount to their consumers through discount coupons. Therefore, consumers compare sites by discounts and then make a final call. So it is important that your online grocery selling website has the feature to offer and process the discount coupons.
Refer a Friend
One of the traditional methods that attract the consumers is to receive certain discounts if they referred their friends. Also, further if their friend purchases a certain amount then they are likely to get the discount on same. This feature on the website can increase sale and build your brand quickly through high-rate of customer acquisition. Apart from encouraging customers to buy from you it also helps in saving cost for acquiring new customers.
The above features are a major center of attraction for today’s consumer. Apart from these few basic features, you need to include:
Categorization: Customers are always in search of the quick process of ordering the products. Systematically arrange your inventory with categories and subcategories for easy navigation to the right product.
Search Tool: If in case customers cannot find their desired product after browsing all the categories, there should be other option of ‘Search’ where they can type in and find the required product. The search bar should also have an auto-suggest feature to add value to the overall customer experience.
Registration: Any online store comes with the registration process where the customer can create their profile and manage orders, save products, repeat orders, past orders, etc.
SEO Ready: Make sure that your website has all keys features to get easily crawled by search engine bots and to rank better. Read here about key On-page SEO tags.
Access from Mobile: Most of the users come from the mobile website. So it is equally important to focus on enhancing your store’s on-the-go purchase experience. This can be achieved in three different ways – making the site responsive, create a separate mobile website or an app.
Implementing the features explained here for developing your own grocery story will require time, effort and investment which is quite challenging. The best way to overcome this is to have has a retail IT solution partner with you to build your grocery store. The solution would be having 70% of all the features by default so that will save time which can be further invested in adding other unique features.
