If you are holding your grocery store back from a digital transformation, consider this: online growth is spiking to unprecedented heights with 30% more global buyers preferring online grocery shopping.
Salesforce Research reports grocers have doubled their online business from 5 to 10% of sales, with half of European customers saying they intend to continue online shopping for future grocery needs. Tesco in the UK has doubled their online capacity, fulfilling 1.5M orders each week during a peak season for home delivery or click and collect.
The numbers don’t lie: online grocery sales will account for 21.5% of total grocery sales by 2025—an estimated $250 billion, which is more than a 60% increase over pre-pandemic estimates according to reports by Digital Commerce 360. Statista forecasts the frozen food industry alone to grow into a $366 billion industry by 2026. For you to be successful long term, a digital transformation is a must.
Upgrade Your Digital Functionality Now
The importance of extending your in-store experience seamlessly to your online experience is crucial to your success. To future proof your organization when launching or enhancing an ecommerce shop, you should seek to ensure that your online experience puts shoppers’ needs first while exceeding expectations and optimizing every step of the shopping journey. You can extend your ecommerce brand’s effectiveness by providing online stores that allow your customers to:
1. Pick a Delivery Method: Whether your customers want to Buy Online Pick up In-Store (BOPIS) option, curbside option or home delivery, your customers want options. Each option offers the flexibility to select a store at checkout, choose a pick-up time and receive notifications when groceries are ready.
2. Create Repeat Orders: Consumers often have predictable tastes and loyalty to many grocery products and brands, so your websites should ensure your customers have an option to save an order or sign up for recurring orders to save time and demonstrate convenience.
3. Create a Shareable Cart: Grocery shopping is often a shared activity between family members or roommates. Making your shopping cart shareable with other registered users allows groups to get items ordered and delivered in one transaction.
4. Be Reminded using an Abandoned Cart Recovery Strategy: The average shopping cart abandonment rate is nearly 75%. You should deploy a solution to automatically send reminders to customers who add products to their cart without completing an order.
5. Add Recipes and Ingredient Lists: Catch a customer’s eye and entice them to buy more items by adding recipe ideas and recommendations. Enable the possibility to include recipe ingredients into shopping and wish lists will set the path to future purchases.
6. Use Coupons: You can send discount coupons to promote seasonal sales or other promotions to your customers and with the right commerce solution you can ensure your websites can receive and process coupons and other offers.
7. Use Welfare Benefits: With more people out of work, reliance on welfare programs has grown considerably. If you are looking to capture more customers, you should consider how to make it easier to spend program dollars at your stories. This could include making welfare benefits an option to use, leveraging a competitive advantage to improve the discoverability of welfare-eligible products for shoppers to keep their baskets inside a budget.
Other essential features you should implement for a memorable customer experience include the possibility to update orders in a mini cart, multi-delivery and pick up time options and packing instructions.
Use a Grocery-Centric Commerce Solution
Several ecommerce solutions are available if you want to open up new lines of revenue, increase online sales, stay ahead of your competition, and improve your market share fast. When you use an ecommerce solution you will be able to harness customer data to create successful promotions, marketing, messaging, inventory management and even loyalty programs. Here’s a few commerce solutions developed by OSF Digital and powered by Salesforce Commerce Cloud to consider:
Quick Start Grocery, is a go-to-market solution allowing you to start your digital transformation selling groceries and essential products in just four weeks. You’ll receive customer behavior insights that will allow you to understand how and when to engage with your customers.
Fast Commerce Grocery, is a fast and affordable solution that helps you strengthen your ecommerce grocery presence. This commerce solution helps you respond to the unique needs of your industry with a full-featured ecommerce site to enhance your customer’s online shopping experience in just ten weeks. You’ll love the tailor-made architecture, pricebook, content management and store-specific data management allowing a unified view of customer data.
Grocery Accelerator, brings industry-dedicated digital innovation to enable you to link your online and physical grocery stores. This easy-to-use commerce install will enhance your digital transformation and allow you to unify your business strategies, channels, and industry-dedicated features.
Contact OSF Digital, the only global Salesforce partner to be recognized as an Expert Navigator in four major commerce categories, about how you can go to market fast with a grocery-dedicated online shop you’ll customers will love.
