There can be hardly any doubt that eCommerce has fully transformed the shopping experience and people’s expectations from retail stores. As e-commerce has almost had an irreversible fact on the way people shop, the future of fulfilling daily needs cannot be separated from online stores.
Particularly the grocery items are now shopped online more than ever before not just because people find it easier to buy things from the comfort of their homes, but also because they get more choices than traditional stores, more financial benefits in the way of offers and discounts and a shopping experience that just suits their lifestyle. No wonder, almost all major online stores selling essentials have joined the bandwagon of online grocery stores.
Why should people buy groceries online when their stores next door sell the same items? Well, here are the answers.
- It saves a lot of time and ensures optimum convenience by allowing customers from the comfort of their homes and making orders anytime, anywhere.
- Thanks to online stores, customers instead of inquiring about unavailable and sought after products in local stores can actually book the products in advance even while they are out of stock and get them delivered when the stock is replenished.
- Online stores allow customers to make orders that serve their repeated demands. Customers can make orders in advance for delivery of the same items once in every week or once in every month.
- Instead of handling cash when buying online, customers can pay through mobile wallets, netbanking, cards and also through cash on delivery options.
- As online stores are accessible by millions of customers, they enjoy a better profitability and a part of that is used for customer loyalty programs, offers, discounts and other programs. Customers often find these benefits as cost cost effective in terms of actual purchase value.
- Lastly, thanks to online stores customers can access products from remote regions and rare varieties. While traditional stores can only have access to regular brands, online stores market unique and rare products across all categories.
Different Types of Grocery Shopping Apps
Now that grocery shopping apps are getting popular, we have several new business models and ways the grocery shopping apps can function. Before you decide to hire magento developers or developers of other skills for your next grocery app, understanding the types of apps and their business models is important.
As of now, we have the following types of grocery shopping apps in the market.
- Single store apps: Such apps rolled out and handled by a single retail company who take care of everything in the process ranging from inventory management, orders, payment and billing to the delivery of items through their own fleet.
- Grocery chains: An online retailer of grocery having multiple warehouses across locations can ensure delivery of ordered items from their nearest facility. Walmart is a great example of grocery chains.
- Aggregator grocery apps: These on-demand apps actually list multiple grocery stores and markets and customers can choose from all these markets and stores and place the order. The app coordinates the ordering and delivery between the respective store and the customer.
- Grocery marketplaces: These are online apps that work much like a virtual marketplace or malls to allow customers purchase from different brands. The marketplace app takes care of the ordering and delivery process through their own fleet.
Building a Customer Friendly Grocery App
Now that you gave a fair idea of how grocery apps function and how to choose an app type based upon the opportunity, audience and your revenue goal and objectives, it is important to take a look at the key features and elementary attributes crucial for building a great grocery app.
As for developing grocery apps, you have pretty extensive choices of tools and frameworks. Some of the leading frameworks for grocery app development include Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop, etc. Magneto development is a pretty popular choice because of the robust range of features and scope of customisation and any one can Hire Dedicated Web Developers. These platforms will help you build the store in a relatively easier way so that you don’t need to code the entire app from scratch.
Let’s have a quick look at the key features that any grocery app must have.
- Logins and signup: For this basic feature, make sure you limit the form fields to a minimum to ensure faster signup. Always make provision for guest login for new customers who need to make purchases in a hurry. Lastly, always provide social login to help customers quickly login using their social credentials.
- Voice search: To help customers find their items instantly with a voice command, introduce voice search function.
- Customisable filters: To make search further smarter, offer multiple customisable filters using which customers can easily sort out products from the store.
- Upwelling and cross-selling: By using AI based recommendation engine you can upsell and cross sell items to customers and enhance the volume of purchases.
- Custom notifications: Use both push notifications and in-app notifications to address customer concerns, inform about lucrative offers and to give updates on the products and delivery.
- Inbuilt Chatbot: Modern grocery stores can also use intelligent chatbots that by learning from the user behaviour and activities can provide the information that customers need and address concerns and provide guidance for a smooth shopping experience.
- Multiple payment options: To ensure maximum flexibility and ease in grocery shopping offer customers multiple payment options and to build credibility ensure integrating secure payment gateways.
- Simple checkout: As most customers leave a store without completing the purchase from the checkout page, make sure it is designed to offer an easy shopping experience without needing customers to provide too much information.
- Robust backend: In the end smooth performance of the app is what matters most. Make sure the app offers faster loading speed and makes product browsing and shopping experience a happy one.
Conclusion
Since online stores hold the future of retail, grocery can hardly be any different. The demand of doorstep grocery delivery particularly surged to the optimum level during the pandemic led crisis. Even when the crisis is over, the demand is still soaring high and so mobile apps seem to be inseparable from the future of grocery shopping.