One of the biggest ecommerce explosions of 2020 was grocery sales.
As one marked example, the Idaho-based grocery company Albertsons, which has a workforce of just over a quarter of a million, and based in more than 2,200 stores, looked at their 2020 Q2 figures… and looked at them again: their ecommerce sales soared 243%.
More broadly, ecommerce grocery sales have doubled.
But these shifting habits are no fad; 85% of consumers who had begun to buy groceries online during the pandemic actually plan to maintain that habit.
So grocery brands and companies should expect to invest in ecommerce to keep in line with where consumers are buying their bread and butter from.
As an act of solidarity with the sector, ArganoUV is offering to throw out into the universe a bunch of tips that can boost sales via improved customer experiences.
Clear, concise key information
We have been buying products from brands we were quite aware of, or lacked knowledge of certain brands. With occasional shortages via the pandemic, we’ve been buying new stuff online, and trying to inform ourselves of brands and products that we were unfamiliar with, opening up endless tabs on our screens to determine what to buy.
Combat this by filling in these gaps in knowledge by clarifying product descriptions. Take gluten-free products, for example. When ordering food from an app, some places will put “gluten-free” in the product name – many don’t, instead, placing it right at the end of the product description… by this point I’ve already scrolled past that particular product because the information wasn’t clear.
But more generally, display dietary and nutritional information on all products – personally I check all nutritional labels in-store before buying and if I’m buying online, I also want to know the nutrients that each product has.
Use clear and universally-recognized labels – vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, high in fat, high in salt, kosher, halal… you get it.
Help consumers make the right choices and pick the products that they want.
Create convenience
How online shoppers feel about an ecommerce site is as much tied to its experience as the products themselves. And so that means creating digital experiences that are convenient. Consider this: enable consumers to pull up recipes from your homepage so that they can look up dishes that they want to cook up. Then from here, you can add product bundles based on these dishes for customers to buy.
(One ecommerce platform that does this particularly well is Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud, which takes it a step further and allows brands to put various items together as a group, which can be viewed together. And beyond the grocery sector, bundles work extremely well for fashion brands and retailers.)
Another example: grocery ecommerce stores are quite different from the others. If you’re doing your weekly or bimonthly shop then customers are going to be adding a lot of items to their basket… and hopefully buy. So allow shoppers to save their purchases so that in 6 days or 11 days time, their previous order list will be ready and waiting – saving them a lot of time.
Boost in-store pickups
Make sure that consumers can shop online and pick up in-store. Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud has solutions for specific features for click and collect. And the platform also locates where customers are so that they can shop from their local store, ensuring that what customers click and add to basket online are in stock in the stores in which they’re going to pick them up.
Then through your order management system, like Salesforce Order Management, each store manages their delivery and pickup times, with time slots being auto-generated based on staffing levels.
PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.
