How To Take Your Grocery Business To The Next Level

If you are in the grocery business, you might have suffered from the policies and restrictions that your government has taken to prevent the spread of Coronavirus.

Because everybody was asked to stay at home, your shop has lost its regular clients and was no more able to attract new customer traffic. Your sales have dramatically decreased and stress has started to invade your life.

If you still can afford to pay the rent of your store despite this period of crisis, you should definitely consider yourself lucky, because others struggle or fail to do it.

Is there a way to overcome this awkward situation and save your business from these extensive losses?

Yes, there is!

Through this article, you will understand why today you have more reason than ever to not settle for traditional methods and bring your grocery online.

You will also discover IT solutions that will help you to back up your business.

You will learn how you can use these solutions to:

• Make your business more efficient,
• Secure more sales,
• Retain your customers,
• Engage with and create value for your current customers as well as prospective ones,
• Gain a competitive edge.

How can you bring your grocery online:

Imagine for a second if you could help your clients with running errands. Imagine if they had the ability to browse the aisles and shelves of your shop from their homes, place their orders online and receive them at their doorstep.

Your business would definitely have been still operating in spite of the lockdown. You would even gain more indeed.

There is an IT product that can help you to build an online business model for your grocery business.

Customer Grocery App or Website:

A platform for your customers to choose and buy groceries and kitchen supply online. It can be a website, a mobile app or both. Depending upon your initial budget, target audience, geography you can choose one or all platforms for your business. It generally has the following features.

Registration:

An easy and user-friendly registration, either through email id, mobile number or social media log in, allows your customers to create their personal accounts.

This is how you can keep sending out your exciting offers and sale notices, even for the occasional shoppers and for free. No need to waste money on postage and printing costs so that you can send a flyer to shoppers who didn’t visit your store for months.

That’s also how you can create an expanding client portfolio.

What’s more, when the user logs in through social media, you can benefit from free advertising thanks to the options to share your offers.

Favourite list:

This option allows the customers to save, for later purchase, the items that they are interested in but not going to buy immediately.
You can remind your customers of this list through the push notifications to generate more sales.

Search:

This feature makes it easy for users to look for their preferred items. It can include specific filters to offer ease and convenience to your customers.

Think of it as the billboards that you hang up on your shop, aisle by aisle, to give an overview of the available choices and help your clients search for what they want.

Tracking:

Tracking gives your customers the ability to know the status of their order, and also to track it from the dispatch to the estimated time for delivery or collection.

Delivery Scheduling:

It allows your customers to choose a delivery date and time slot for their order as per their convenience. They don’t have to worry if they won’t be at home for a reason or another. They can schedule their delivery according to their availability.

Payment Options:

The grocery app or website usually integrates multiple payment gateways, offering card payment (debit/credit card), cash on delivery, and mobile wallet.

Giving the choice to your customers to decide how they wish to pay for their orders helps with conversion. Indeed, even people who are not very comfortable with online payment can still place their orders and alternatively select the cash on delivery option.

Why an online grocery store is a blessing for your business:

In addition to the above basic features, having a grocery app gives you the opportunity to collect valuable data about your customers and be aware of their behaviour.

You will have access to every single detail related to their shopping experience, including their personal likes and dislikes, their monthly shopping list, their location, their birthdays, their contact list and more.

based on these important inputs, and the available analytic tools, you can offer customized services to your clients. For instance, when a user selects an item, you can display the other items purchased by other users in combination with the selected item and lure him/her into buying more.

Or, you can recommend additional products based on customers previous search preferences as you have the ability to monitor the products they frequently purchase.

What’s more, by getting an insight into your grocery app users behaviour, you can even better allocate the shelf space of your physical store and make more accurate predictions regarding stock levels for certain offers.

It is also possible to reach out to more customers thanks to the contact list of your clients who signed in with their social media accounts.

Furthermore, you can strategically build an emotional connection with your customers and earn their loyalty. For this, you can, howsoever, give digital coupons, loyalty points, cashback, a little gift on birthdays of your loyal clients, exciting offers, daily deals, discounts, free home deliveries and many more.

Web-based Admin Panel:

The admin panel is linked to the grocery app or website through the same database.
A database is like a book or storage where information is stored on the server. That’s why, whenever the admin makes modifications via his panel, everything is automatically updated on the customer app and delivery app as well.

The admin can manage categories and sub-categories. For example, “vegetables” is a category, While “green vegetables” and “seasonal vegetables” are subcategories.

This is called Product Listing. Just like you have to arrange your products on the shelves of your physical store according to their nature, product listing feature gives you the possibility to organize your grocery items into products and sub-products, with their respective descriptions.

The admin can create products and add new products to the catalog. This will help the store manager to keep track of the inventory. You or your staff will never have to guess whether a product is available at your store or not.

You can manage prices of the products, manage records for delivery boys accounts, and have an overview of orders that are coming in.

You can update the status of the order. There are generally 5 statuses of an order: Order Received, Payment Received, Order Dispatched, Order Delivered.

The admin panel gives you the opportunity to keep track of your turnover and to manage supplies and supplier list as well.

Delivery App:

This is dedicated to the delivery agents. It allows them to receive notifications of the order they need to deliver.
They get detailed information about when to pick the order and where and when to deliver it.

Then, they collect the package from the inventory and deliver it to the customer place. But, meanwhile, they also update the status of the order so that customers can readily track it.

if the payment is already made online, through card or mobile wallet, it’s a prepaid order. The delivery agent just closes the order and updates the status in this case.

If it’s a cash on delivery, he collects the money and makes an entry of the exact amount he has collected.

How can a grocery app create value for your customers:

With a grocery app, consumers can easily find a spectrum of items under different categories. However, the advantages that are offered to the users are countless.

You are giving them the opportunity to save time and money and easily fit their grocery shopping around their other commitments even at peak times.

They can avoid parking hassles, crowded aisles and queue at the checkout.

whether it is one or two items or a long list of items, they can shop in the comfort of their home, according to their schedule and their availability.

They can browse offers online at their leisure and get the best prices by knowing what other brands are priced at for similar products and easily making comparisons.

They can place their order from anywhere and it will be delivered to their address, at the time frame that is most convenient for them.

Indeed, you are not only offering them a completely hassle-free shopping experience but also a seamless one.

They will be able to take advantage of some enticing offers and alluring discounts.

They can also keep a track record of how much they are spending on the grocery items every month and control it in case it is exceeding their estimate.

Conclusion:

If you have a grocery-based app beefed up with mobile payment options, tap-and-collect facilities and on-door delivery services, you have a chance to become a hub for delivery, in both your immediate local area and the extended residences in your city.

You’ll also have the right assets to increase customer loyalty, win new clients and better manage your business. Thus, you can stand to make considerably more money in the long run.

Are you interested in the grocery business? Don’t panic or worry if you don’t have a physical shop! You still have the option to launch your business and run it online with even fewer costs and promising returns!

If you are excited by the idea, get in touch. We will be pleased to help you start and grow your business!

Originally published at http://www.abaxsoft.com on July 9, 2020.