In the first part of our series on the features one must include when building an online grocery store, we discussed some of the front-end features for the customer’s browsing convenience. In this post, we discuss some of the features designed for a smooth checkout experience for your customers.
As a low-margin but high-volume business in a country with a huge untapped market, the grocery sector has the potential for immense success. To unlock this potential, your business needs a webstore designed keeping in mind the specific needs of online grocery shopping.
The features listed below, tailormade for an online grocery web store, have been pre-tested and pre-packaged in CPG LaunchPro100, a hybris-based rapid deployment solution from Embitel Technologies.
List of front-end features
Repeat orders for speed shopping
Grocery is a regular requirement in each household, and more often than not, consumers have a standard list of items they replenish periodically.
Keeping this in mind, making the provision to reorder items from one’s previous list, or reorder the entire saved shopping list, encourages quick and easy purchase.
Shop by recipe
CPG LaunchPro features an interesting section for recipes—like the recipe for pasta? Simply order the ingredients from the recipe page itself and the consumer will be good to go, without going through the entire process of searching for each item and then adding it to the cart.
Encouraging trust through pickup and/or delivery
Grocery shopping is different: customers have always expressed concern regarding the purchase of perishable items such as fresh fruit and vegetables, poultry and meat. For such items, consumers like to see, touch, even smell the products before purchase to ensure freshness and good quality.
For this, the omnichannel retail feature of ‘click-and-collect’ is particularly useful: place your order online, and collect your goods from the store after inspection.
So CPG LaunchPro, a 100-day implementation solution, allows consumers opt for delivery or click-and-collect, or even a combination both for different parts of an order.
Delivery slot selection
Grocery shopping often means buying perishables, or buying fresh produce to be utilized at a specific time for meal preparation. So consumers want to be present to receive their order, instead of finding it languishing outside the door for hours and losing freshness.
Keeping this in mind, retailers must let the consumers choose a delivery time slot. If the slot options are populated into the site based on concurrent logistics, it will avoid disappointment for the customer.
Customer acquisition through discounts and promotional offers
The biggest driver for consumers is price, and offering seasonal discounts or promotions at certain thresholds encourages them to buy more. Displaying these on the checkout page gives the consumer the satisfaction of scoring a good deal and saving even as they pay their bill.
Payment methods to suit all needs
Offering a variety of payment methods such as by credit or debit card, cash on delivery, coupons and points, helps the retailer to reach out to a larger number of people, an important factor to offset the low margins in the grocery and FMCG sector.
Reviews and social media sharing
Consumers trust reviews from fellow buyers and tend to frequent webstores that carry reviews to help them make a decision. This feature will encourage footfall as well purchase.
Social media sharing is a must on our ecommerce websites cater to consumers’ desire to share info of their latest purchases with their network.
Don’t forget to include all these features in a user-friendly and cohesive manner on your website. The guidance and experience of a good UI designer can be valuable here.
While you are giving your consumers a smooth and pleasant shopping experience with all these features, how do you fulfil them? With solid backend operations, of course.
Watch out for our next post on the backend functions required to carry out the above conveniences and manage operations efficiently.
