With eCommerce Grocery Sales Doubling, Here is How to Keep Control on your Site

By focussing on curating customer convenience and smoother access to online product information, online grocery stores are capable of boosting their sales.

Of course, Covid has accelerated the process and spread of ecommerce and altered the commerce landscape forever moving forward. And steering back to the grocery space, at the global level, there are now 30% more ecommerce grocery shoppers.

In addition, grocery stores doubled their ecommerce sales from an average of 5% to 10%. And among those shoppers who have bought groceries online since the pandemic, at least half of them intend on continuing to shop online.

For grocers, being online is not a luxury position, nor is it a space that is allowed to be neglected; it cannot be an afterthought. And despite customer loyalty to a first-choice store remaining relatively strong, it is expanded and strengthened in the digital space. 

The commerce trauma a year ago of empty shelves, digital waiting rooms, unrecovered delivery time slots, and full-blown website crashes are images that do not want to be replicated by ecommerce stores.

So how can online grocery stores squeeze out an advantage, to construct a competitive edge across their ecommerce channels?

There are multiple digital products and experiences that can be implemented to bolster ecommerce and edge out an advantage.

Provide greater detail

One of these is to provide a brand’s customers the information that they believe to be key to deciding which products to purchase. Put simply, help your own shoppers make better, more informed choices when it comes to their shopping basket choices.

Adding detail to the content may include aspects, such as displaying logos for products that are animal-free, vegetarian, gluten-free, keto; color-coding products; clearly displaying nutritional labels; ingredients for non-food products like cleaning supplies.

Such additions show your customers that you care about their specific wants and needs, and that you’re catering for them. And as a result, serves to strengthen the confidence and loyalty of your brand.

Make it easy

A second providing is convenience; make it simple for grocery shoppers to do their shopping. When it comes to the experience that a company provides, 79% of consumers believe it to be as important as the products themselves. Shoppers are increasingly expecting good and smooth digital experiences when they’re shopping.

What this means for brands is that their digital landscape needs tending to, cultivating, and maintaining at the standards set by their own customers. Take for example those people who frequently cook but are in need of some inspiration for their next dish, so add a recipe page to your website and a tick list of ingredients that are needed. Provide videos of recipes and add bundles of ingredients for them to click straight into their basket.

Something else to consider is allowing shoppers to save their purchases as a grocery list, so that they are able to reorder it next time rather than going through the drudgery of selecting 20-50 items from scratch before heading to checkout.

The in-store connection

A third improvement is to the in-store pickup experience. Despite free delivery becoming the default of digital orders, many consumers are willing to pay for deliveries that they can receive within 6 hours of ordering.

Solutions such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud provide specific functions for this type of slot management, like click and collect services, and geolocating of their closest stores from where they’re able to collect from.

PS: ArganoStudios is one of the world’s leading digital products & experiences consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.