Online Grocers: Accelerating out of the turn-3
Happy New Year to everyone and let’s hope we are moving towards a more positive economy and upswing in consumer sentiment. On that note, continuing from previous posts (Part 1 & Part 2)wherein we talked about ideas driven around the value theme, online retailers will have to additionally provide customers a richer shopping experience and engage them deeply, particularly around community interaction.
Also, the previous post is now part of a white paper. You can download the paper here to get more details.
In this post, Jayanth and I put together notes on offering a “Richer shopping experience – through innovative adoption of technology and capabilities”.
I) Offer Advanced and Intuitive Search Capabilities
Given the wide variety of flavors, colors, fragrances, pack sizes and product forms available in grocery providing a customer the ability to quickly hone into the product she is looking for is a sure fire way to expand cart size and this paradoxically also leads to longer browse times as a customer getting positive results through search will continue to look up products she would otherwise not have cared to locate online.
Leveraging enhanced search capabilities that are in use by leading online apparel and footwear retailers, online grocers can use search as a unique differentiator to position themselves in customer’s minds as the site that is easiest to shop from.
II) Offer Faceted Navigation – “Placing products in the customer’s preferred aisle”
As a merchandiser, the right question to ask is “Would online customers want to reach this product by looking for it differently?”
Since there are multiple parameters a customer will look for in a product before finalizing the buy decision, it makes sense for online stores to enable navigation in that natural way using faceted classification
Faceted classification and navigation involves managing the product catalogue by enabling multiple product perspectives that can be assigned to a category. Such a classification supports navigation to the product in several ways, rather than a single pre set order
Browsing the website in this manner will enhance customer experience and be a unique differentiator by
• Enabling customers to use the site in a way they feel most intuitive and comfortable
• Allowing customers to browse and learn within topic areas by providing access to references,related links and other associated information
• Creating a more meaningful interaction and shopping experience for the customer
III) Provide recommendations, Personalization / Customization
Using previous shopping cart data to offer a customer, relevant options in terms of package size, additional flavors and paired products will often make her appreciate the convenience of shopping with the particular website and thus drive additional visits and sales.
Analyzing and segmenting loyalty card data is imperative to offering the right recommendations. To explain, today most grocery retailers may not know the number of members in a customer’s household and while based on previous shopping history, they can recommend the right product; they miss the opportunity to recommend the right product in the right package size and thereby delight the customer.
That’s it for now and in the next post we’ll look at how online grocers can engage customers and build a community to harness the power of many.
