Some new ideas grow seemingly overnight, and soon it is like everyone had always used Spotify or iTunes to listen to music, or Amazon to buy basically everything. Online grocery shopping is not one of these yet, but does it have the potential to become one? What would be needed to make online grocery feasible, and can it ever truly compete against traditional brick-and-mortar stores for customer experience?
World of E-grocery
Walking into a supermarket, one rarely calculates the shopping trip in terms of time. For many, it is a chore to be completed, while for others an enjoyable moment spent picking what you want to eat tomorrow. In both cases, it’s just something we do. But not all people like to do things the regular way: In the UK, more than 7% of grocery shopping gets done online, with France trailing with about 5%. Germany, with a grocery sector heavily relying on discounters, is lagging behind, but with the introduction of Amazon Fresh and more and more of the old players starting their own online stores a rapid growth is all but guaranteed. In the US especially the bigger cities have a growing business in online supply of edibles – especially so after Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods. Various East Asian countries have also invested heavily in online grocery.
Stand and Deliver
So far, there seem to emerge two main ways of doing online grocery business: one may take the UK-approach, where fleets of vans deliver the groceries to the customer. Or there is the French way, known as click-and-collect, where the customer orders online and picks up their shopping at a store or a special car-accessible collection stands.
But online grocery is not without its challenges. Delivery services require fleets of specialized vans with refrigeration capabilities, and price competition on deliveries eats into the stores’ profit margin. And click-and-collect has its own temperature-related problems, as prepacked shopping bags can contain anything from frozen foods to fresh veg, which require very different conditions to preserve quality.
The Discerning Customer
Of course, the preserving of produce is a familiar problem for those groceries that have stores already in business. They have cold chain equipment and temperature monitoring systems in use, so mere quality preservation should not be too difficult. The challenge facing online sales in particular deals more with the actual customer. There is a tendency in people to prefer tactile selecting of food – that is, they wish to go and feel things with their own hands; to make sure what they are buying is good quality. Therefore, when buying online, a person will automatically worry over the quality of the product they have purchased.
But the fear of receiving sub-par stock is somewhat gratuitous: the seller usually has a policy of accepting back and reimbursing rejected items. Depending on the country in question, there may also be laws in place to ensure unviolated cold chain until the product reaches the consumer, so the safety of the purchase won’t become suspect.
How then to assure the customer of the fact that their shopping will arrive on time and be of good quality?
Visible Quality
One easy-to-adopt practice might be one that connects both of the aforementioned problems. The opportunities provided by the cold chain, even where it is not mandated by the state, are something more grocery sellers should consider. If the customers are increasingly worried about the conditions their fresh produce arrives in, then improved visibility in the cold chain, provided by real-time monitoring, might well be the answer here.
The challenge of dropping profits from deliveries could also be a addressed, as providing additional service is something many people are willing to pay for, as has been proved in the case of same-day deliveries.
Being able to show which route and in what kind of conditions the produce has been transported might be just the thing to convince a discerning customer to take their business to a webstore. And of course, the wholesaler might even provide the same data on their storage conditions – or the whole way from farm to fork if they so wished. This could be achieved through the Sensire logistics monitoring system, which can be used to display data from multiple sources, be it from Sensire sensors or third-party monitoring systems. In any case, quality validation in e-grocery is a question that needs to be answered sooner rather than later.
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