Most grocers are in their 2nd or starting their third generation online/mobile/social offering for their consumers. Most are also being admonished, repeatedly at this year’s FMI, to be move more aggressively into the multichannel world. Most grocers reportedly reacted with some hesitation as they try to sort out what things are bleeding edge and therefore unnecessary and what might get them “ahead” of their competition. Unfortunately there is a great deal of advice, most of it expensive and much of it touting yesterday’s news.
Bill Bishop did the first useful benchmarking of how consumers view their grocer’s digital offerings in his report Connecting with Modern Grocery Shoppers (http://www.brickmeetsclick.com/special-offer–connecting-with-modern-grocery-shoppers ). A fascinating read well worth the investment to get inside the issues, but the nub of it is that the consumer sees a pretty big gap between their view of their physical store and their view of the online offerings from that store. In other words there is a lot of room for improvement and no one has this even close to right today!
These two points seem contradictory. “Hurry up and do something”, and “no one really has pulled this all together to the satisfaction of consumers.” So what can we do productively in the short and mid-term and what approach should we take with our customers?
Bill’s report is correct when it reports that no one has done this right, it is also true that some have done things more correct than others. It is time to take some lessons my design of the MyWebGrocer system. This service continues to convert grocery shoppers into buyers at rates 2 and 3 X the nearest competitors in the food industry.
Be simple to use. Maybe it is worth a consumer’s time to learn how to buy a car online or a computer but butter? Most online grocery tools are too hard to use. Even old pros such as Peapod fall into these traps. I recently gave the wife an IPad and when she went to access her Peapod account there were 4-6 non-obvious steps. USE YOUR OWN applications and you will find dozens of annoying, useless little steps than need to be eliminated. Enlist your customers and your customer’s data….not for their insights, but to determine where they get frustrated. Product data is part of this as well. If categories and products are not organized logically it will thwart even the most determined consumer. This is usually overlooked and data that comes natively from suppliers always needs to be worked into a consumer friendly order.
1. Different applications need to feed each other. If the shopper wants to shift from the ad to the recipe engine, let her. And let her do that from the site, or her mobile or through a link in the email reminder you just sent her. Seems obvious but almost no one does this well today and it means that the consumer is forced to assemble parts into actions. If you THINK your offerings do this, see the point about simplicity above and USE YOUR OWN SYSTEM.
2. Does your pricing discount schemes work on your site? Your loyalty card discounts? Do prices tie out to stores and visa versa? Are the items a customer sees in an ad for a store the same as are offered IN that store? If not you are in no position to even begin to win at this effort.
3. Customers are in your stores to buy products. If the product data online does not match the products offered in the store customers become frustrated, confused and they will look for competitive alternatives. This affects the simplest of things including the customer shopping lists. If they are generic (peanut butter) vs. specific to a customer they do nothing to build loyalty to your store. Items with “image coming soon” do not sell. Items with images that are different from the packaging on shelf at the very least confuse and slow the customer down. I hate to say this, but if you want an advantage this is one area you can create one, but you will need to collect product data yourself.
Make it personal. One of the dirty little, brilliant secrets to success in this multi-channel world is the customer data. If you have loyalty data it must be the crux of the offering to the customer. If you don’t have loyalty data you need to lever the data you will collect from each customer online, but you are operating with one arm tied behind your back. A site that looks at customers thru the lens of EACH CUSTOMER will have advantages in speed, simplicity, interactivity, conversion and retention. And it will have a huge advantage in development. This approach is how Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Google, Groupon and others will come at this market, should and when they decide to do so. If you are already operating from this perspective….really operating from it, you will have a shot at playing alongside them.
Traditional grocers look at their assortment as a strategic weapon in this war. It is not. The big pure plays flank this view (Amazon) and it is only traditional retailers who forget the importance of assortment in their shopper offering when they go online (most grocers limit their online offerings and suffer because of it). Hybrid distribution models will and are becoming available and must be brought online to take advantage of the store’s proximity to the consumer without entirely relying on the range handled in the store, while at the same time taking advantage of that inventory.
· Supply and delivery logistics
· Store picking capabilities.