A Look Into Digital Groceries — North American and SEA Perspective
COVID-19 has not made 2021 any easier. As the pandemic continues, the number of people who got infected keeps on increasing. However in contrast, the need of doing errands like buying groceries has not reduced. Online grocery shopping has become a new normal. In fact, according to emarketer insider intelligence, the growth of online grocery sales in the US was predicted to grow by nearly 53% in 2020 sales. It keeps on increasing whereby in 2023, online grocery sales are being forecasted to reach $129.72 billion. The trend in Southeast Asia is similar because the pandemic affects in a global scale and the number of online purchases is higher compared to the US.
According to IGD Asia, online grocery sales in Asia are estimated to reach $295 billion in 2023. Southeast Asia’s online shopping growth is keeping up with Amazon. Currently it is dominated by Alibaba, JD, and Pinduoduo, but other eCommerce such as Coupang, Lotte, RedMart, Shoppee, Tokopedia, Flipcart are also growing tremendously. An article from Fast Company says that Asia is the future of e-commerce and is three to five years faster.
This tremendous online shopping growth both from the US and Southeast Asia made us wonder what key points we can learn to achieve success in the grocery shopping experience. Taking observation from several grocery companies, below are a few interesting product features and ideas to consider.
GROCERY LIST
Most grocery apps always provide a grocery list, it is a must-have feature. But is listing down products that customers want to buy helpful enough? How can the grocery list be elevated to provide a better experience when buying groceries?
Personally, buying groceries is a big effort as it could be very time-consuming. Buying the same thing over and over again manually is not fun. What if your grocery app can help to predict when customers are running low of stock? The app could then help to set the date when to purchase repeating orders.
Amazon’s successful practice of personalization through big data can be implemented to find the pattern in customers’ shopping habits. Through purchase history, it will show what items shoppers normally get, how many, how often do they buy groceries daily, weekly, monthly, and how much they are willing to spend. It can be further personalized by giving a notification or a popup banner to remind customers that they are low on supplies and ask them if they want to add the products to their list for their next purchase. To provide a seamless experience, from planning and buying groceries, to receiving the products on hand, a calendar feature can be added within the grocery list. This allows customers to be able to plan and buy groceries on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, and they also can set the date for pick up (curbside) or delivery (Gojek or Grab) at the same time.
PERSONAL ASSISTANT
Take Hypermart as an example of being proactive in helping customers with their grocery needs. Through WhatsApp, the customer has a virtual personal assistant ready called Bella. This is adapted from Indonesian culture, the need to check on fresh produce that customers are going to get. In late 2019, Walmart announced that customers can order groceries through the Apple Siri voice assistant. By pairing Walmart and Siri accounts, it allows users to arrange for delivery or in-store pick-up.
CART ITEMS
The GrabMart and GoMart app has its own drawbacks. When shoppers have already chosen and added products into their carts but then need to change location or store, they would have to repeat the action of filling the cart again. It would be great if they can adapt the ‘Copy Cart’ features from Happy Fresh and Save On Foods, which allows customers to copy the items from a different store. Additionally, shoppers can reorder groceries right away from the homepage.
What makes the Save On Foods app special is that it has a reminder telling you if you plan to buy products with a weekly promotion that is currently ongoing. They remind you to make sure to schedule the order before the end of the weekly deal. If you change to a different store but the product is not available in that store, the app provides columns for customers to write product substitution. To give more value, it can be further personalized by displaying similar product recommendations as well.
RECIPES
For users that are not too skilled in cooking and planning their own food menu, the Happy Fresh app can also be very helpful and engaging by providing recipes to try out. It provides the prep time, length of duration to cook, number of servings, as well as the ingredients list needed to make the dish. If you already have some of the ingredients, you can choose and add the products you are missing. A quick step if you do not have any of it, just click on the ‘Add All’ button.
This recipe features can also be found in the Save On Foods and Walmart. Walmart has done this in a seasonal approach, for example during Chinese New Year. They provide menus suitable for the festive season. Meanwhile Save On Foods, similar to Happy Fresh, even though not thematic, they provide recipes for you to try.
To make recipes more engaging and relatable to the user, it can be further personalized by providing different menus. It could be a menu that is suitable for people who want to go for a keto diet, vegetarian, or menus for people with diabetes or high cholesterol. Apart from that, the purchase history big data can be utilized to suggest different recipes that users can explore according to their preferences. For example, if a user often buys soya sauce and chicken, the app can suggest them a soya sauce-based recipe like teriyaki chicken.
TEAM PURCHASE
JD.id, a giant eCommerce company has a product feature called ShareBuy. It is a game-changer for people who love to hunt for promotions while shopping for the sake of getting a cheaper price. Customers do not have to wait for upcoming promotions or weekly deals anymore to enjoy a price cut. They just have to invite other people to buy the same product as them in ShareBuy.
Having ShareBuy on the grocery platform increases repeat orders. It increases engagements as well due to its requirement for users to send invitations. It builds loyalty among the JD community and at the same time, new customers are coming in. Please note this is not suitable for those who want to get their products on the same day. At a minimum, it needs to be one day prior before they need the product. This is because they need to wait until the person they have invited has submitted their own payment, then the order can be processed.
A company that initially started selling fruits and fresh produce like Pinduoduo from China, has become the largest eCommerce firm after Alibaba and JD. Pinduoduo offers a similar value for money concept through team purchases on their platform. Today, they have become the largest online marketplace for agricultural products in Southeast Asia. They will continue to offer fun and interactive experiences that can bring the best digital economy to everyone.
SAVINGS AND BUDGETING
Learning from banking apps like Bank of America and Jenius from BTPN, tracking expenses is important to manage cash flow. Knowing most people are price-oriented in buying groceries, what if these expense charts are adopted into savings charts? It is similar to an expense summary, but focusing more on savings and not expenses. By showing how much customers have saved money from all collected coupons or promos, the expectation on this is to trigger customers to have a bigger size purchase and repeat order.
In addition, the concept of budgeting in online grocery can be applied as well. Imagine if these apps can help customers to list down items they want to add to their grocery list, prepare meals for a week with available recipes, have access to all products with a cheaper price through team purchase without waiting for available promotions, up until savings features where they can have a summary of how much they save up from buying groceries — and everything can be done by a voice assistant. It sure is a different kind of grocery shopping experience.
In the midst of COVID-19 pandemic, grocery stores are still striving to deliver a better and personalized shopping experience. There are still many features from both international or local grocery companies that would still need to be further adapted according to the target customer’s behavior. Sixty Two always keep evolving in understanding users’ needs and designing impactful products.
For you who are keen to provide a seamless shopping experience in your business, we are here ready to collaborate with you. Drop us a line at hi@sixtytwo.co and check out our Instagram at @sixtytwo.co or LinkedIn to know us more!
