Are you willing to lose 1% of your business? This one question stood out to me the most from Ignite – The Ecommerce Leadership Conference, powered by Syndigo. While brick and mortar grocery won’t be replaced by ecommerce anytime soon, grocers are currently losing at least 1% of their business to online shopping, whether it’s through Amazon, Walmart, or another competitor. In fact, a June 2019 Forbes article notes that 2% of food retail is purchased online. That number is only expected to grow as consumers become more comfortable with others selecting their fresh meat and produce. The thought of adding an ecommerce offering at your store seems overwhelming. It takes time, effort, and money to fully implement it. It can be an uncomfortable change. But as Kate noted in her recap of the event, discomfort is what leads to innovation. Innovation can lead to exponential growth. But you don’t need exponential growth right now, you just need to understand the environment. Start asking questions about costs, data files and technology integrations. Ask your customers if they’d be interested in…
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Building Profitable Sales in Online Shopping
Unlike a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, if you build an online shopping marketplace, customers might not simply come to play. When a store first launches online shopping, a few customers will be ready to jump on board right away. Everyone else, however, will need some coaxing as they’re asked to change long-held shopping habits. The general rule is to get a customer to make three online grocery purchases to make them a regular online shopper. Beyond general marketing of the program, how else can you encourage online purchases? ONLINE & FACEBOOK ADVERTISINGFind online shoppers where they’re hanging out: the internet. Through online targeted advertising, retailers can advertise to a specific demographic on specific websites such as Better Homes & Gardens or Men’s Health. Highlight special online-only sale or even a certain item. The same can be done on Facebook. While a store’s general posts may be seen by its Facebook followers, you can pay to have your post shown to the people you want to see it, adjusted by age, gender, location and interests. Include…
Trends: A Look at Today’s Grocery Shopper Webinar Recap
State of the Grocery Market: 86% of all adults now say they have at least some of the responsibility for household grocery shopping. This is an important change because it is bringing in more consumers to the grocery retail world. In the past grocery shopping was fulfilled by one person, now that is only the case in 25% of US households. So, 75% of US households split the grocery shopping responsibility in some way making it a team sport. Sharing the shopping responsibility didn’t affect the number of trips like you would think. That number is around 1.6 trips per week and has remained fairly constant over the past 5 years. However, these lifestyle changes have made the biggest impact on trip frequency. Increases Trips: Reduced planning for meals Urbanization (People live, work, play, eat and shop all in the same neighborhood) Desire for freshness Decreases Trips: Sharing the shopping responsibilities Migration to online Increased reliance on food services The average weekly spend for a household is $113.50 which aligns with inflation. Of the shoppers that were surveyed only 13%…
Trending Now: February
It’s time for our second installment of Trending Now! I’ll make this quick before something else takes the place of these items currently taking the internet by storm. I spend too much time on social media and follow a ton of food accounts, so I guess that’s not such a bad thing after all! Here’s what I’ve noticed lately: Rumors: Word is spreading that grocery ecommerce isn’t taking off as fast as expected and stores aren’t making as much as they had hoped. I have lots of thoughts about this. At the VMC show last week, a member said to me, “I know online shopping isn’t going away, this is a long-term play,” and he’s right. It’s definitely not a silver bullet to save a struggling store and it takes a lot of effort on the part of the store to make it successful. It’s not a “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” scenario. You have to let the right people know about it, entice them to try it, and then you have to impress the heck out of them to keep them coming back.…
Disappointment in Online Grocery Shopping
This blog post started as a recap of recent news in the online grocery world. I got about halfway through last night and decided to finish today. Then I tried to shop for groceries online over my lunch hour. Let’s talk about that. I’m having a party to watch football at 11AM tomorrow morning, so I want to pick up my groceries on the way home from work this evening. Those egg casseroles need to sit in the fridge all night, after all. Online grocery options on my way home or near my home are currently limited to Hy-Vee, Walmart, and Instacart. I’ve used Instacart in the past, and as a customer I’m not wild about their product markups and service fees. So I thought I’d check out Hy-Vee’s service. After filling my online cart, I go to check out. I realize they have the wrong store selected, so I change it. After making the store change, I see I can’t pick up the groceries until the 6-7PM window. That’s later than I want to pick up, so I change…
Using Promo Codes to Grow Online Grocery
We’ve received mixed review about the success of promo codes in online shopping, so I wanted to learn more about what works, what doesn’t, and how we can improve marketing efforts with promo codes. I reached out to our partners at Rosie to see what their data can tell us. Alyssa Nappa, head of Shopper Marketing at Rosie wrote this blog post for us to share with you. Take it away, Alyssa! Incentivizing customers with promotional “coupon” codes is a proven strategy for growing your online grocery service. Whether your customer is placing their first order or their tenth order, promotional codes will entice them to return to your online store for their grocery needs. At Rosie, we encourage all of our retailer partners to offer promotional codes in their marketing materials, regardless if they are just launching their eCommerce service or have been live on the platform for several years. There are three popular types of promotion codes; a flat dollar amount off the total order, a percent off the total order, and a free pickup or free delivery.…
Handling Online Shopping Order Volumes
A common question I hear from retailers getting started in online shopping is, “How do I handle a varying number of orders?” I reached out to Brian Moyer, Co-Founder & CEO of Freshop, to hear what he’s seeing throughout the industry. Here’s what he had to say: Order volume: Concerned about getting orders out the door? There a couple of easy ways to control the flow. Staff as a secondary to start. Train a cashier and have order notifications going to management. Once an order comes in you would have a couple of hours to get a window where the lanes are slow to get the order picked. The biggest danger to start is not having the order ready when the customer shows up, so monitoring notices is critical. As you grow, the personal shopper will become more and more dedicated. To manage labor costs, provide tasking on where they should be working when no orders need to be picked and have a way to track those hours to charge the department using the resource. Front-end is simplest, but many…
The Best Way to Ensure a Successful Online Shopping Program
Just like in store, providing high-quality customer service can make or break your online shopping program. In a recent digitaltrends.com article, writer Erika Rawes tries out Walmart’s free grocery pickup service, but waits more than 30 minutes from the time she pulled up to the store to collect her family’s groceries to the time she leaves. Once home, she finds out she was charged for 10 missing items. If I personally had this experience, I doubt I’d try it again and I would guess that I’m not alone. The whole point to offering curbside pickup is to make grocery shopping easier and faster for the customer. Selecting a partner that provides a clean and user-friendly online experience is the first step, but after that, it’s up to your team to provide a pleasant experience for your customer. First, you have to select a personal shopper who knows what they’re doing. They need to know how to pick and handle the freshest produce and other perishable items. As a customer, I’d rather not get a carton of milk (or any perishable…
Optimizing Omni-Channel Grocery Shopping
Marketing Communications Strategies for Independent Grocery Retailers If you’ve read my past blog posts or follow me on social media, you know I’ve been busy with graduate school for the past three years in addition to working at AWG. Good news: after a full year of researching, writing and finally defending, I have competed my thesis and graduated with my master’s degree from Mizzou! So what does this mean for you? I’ve condensed my 80-page thesis down to a quick summary of what I learned. The What The lovely title of this blog post is also the title of my thesis. In layman’s terms: I studied how independent grocery retailers (like AWG members) can successfully market and communicate their online grocery shopping offerings to their customers to secure sales online and in-stores. I did this through marketing email communications. The Why Besides the fact that I work at AWG each day and have a vested interest in helping our retailers, omni-channel grocery shopping (online and in-store shopping options) is constantly evolving and grabbing headlines in the news. For example: “By…
Grocer Pod – Episode 6
I was able to to sit down with many great people Tuesday, March 26 at the AWG Innovation Showcase for the latest episode of AWP. We covered a wide range of topics. See below for contact info for each guest. Eric Qualman (0:37) – Digital Leadership Polly Schau, Wells Enterprises (8:05) – Ice Cream Doug Baker, FMI (11:37) – Smart Label Chad Fowles, Unilever (16:44) – Frozen Novelty and Personal Care Pat Hughes, eGrowcery (23:33) – Online Shopping Jim Lukens, MSC (31:15) – Digital marketing with Media Solutions Larry Elias, Retail Profit Solutions (43:37) – Labor Management Mike Kienzlen, WheresMyShrink.com (49:41) – Shrink