Once the traditional outposts of online shopping, the green grocers are now embracing the digital store and looking towards creating excellent ecommerce user experiences.
The early months of the pandemic caused many online consumers to become annoyed and frustrated with grocers – so used to intuitive user experiences that are provided by leading ecommerce giants.
Grocery ecommerce stores were quite difficult to navigate, and product substitutions were often poor or inaccurate.
Yet their reputation as the dinosaur of digital began to change. 
The industry as a whole has had time to reflect and adjust to the standards of modern omnichannel experiences.
It has led to the improvement of grocer performance and shoppers are beginning to notice.
For example, ecommerce shoppers can benefit now from grocer websites that are able to use data from previous purchases to offer recommendations and reordering options.
These capabilities result in users being able to quickly add items to their basket, order products, and ultimately build deeper relationships with existing customers.
Another functionality to see an improvement is the search functionality, which helps to drive conversions by squeezing the time difference between shopping and clicking the buy button.
Such elevations to the grocers’ ecommerce capabilities are improving the number of customers coming to their websites and shopping. According to a study, the share of customers saying that speed was a deciding factor for buying groceries online rose from 36.9% to 57.2% – a nice increase of 55%.
Also rising was the number of consumers that cited a good ecommerce experience as a reason for continuing to shop online, growing from 39.7% to 53.4% – an increase of 35%.
Part of this success comes from the rise in smarter substitutions for products that are out of stock, using artificial intelligence to pair better replacement products.
“If you look at the change in buyer trends over the last 24 months,” said Brian Ballad of Upskill, “and heavily accelerated over the last 18 because the consumer interest in buying online and picking up curbside.
“There’s a speed, capacity and accuracy challenge and, frankly, also [it is difficult] to maintain any kind of margin in the extremely tight industry that is retail and grocery.”
With a cocktail of smarter use of data, more intuitive consumer journeys, and more effective fulfillment, grocers are forging ahead with better pathways towards ecommerce experience.
PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading digital products & experiences consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.
