Top things to look for when choosing an ecommerce solution

The CART just released an eCommerce buying guide including a comparison of vendors providing tools and solutions for grocery eCommerce. Digital Foodie succeeded extremely well in the comparison and we are very proud of that. Here are some thoughts linked to the CART guide and Digital Foodie’s offerings.

Efficiency and profitability are the key fundamentals in on-demand grocery shopping

eCommerce sales are growing by 25% every year in the US market and retailers are more focused on profitability. Fulfillment efficiency and accuracy are main fundamentals to online success. The biggest costs are within the fulfillment. If we look at the fulfillment process, we can find sub processes that can be optimized independently from each others: picking, transaction processing, pickup and home deliveries. Digital Foodie has been highly involved in large scale retailers’ fulfillment processes and has managed to increase the efficiency in each of the sub processes mentioned above.

The picking process:

Digital Foodie provides very user friendly and intuitive iPad based app for multi-order picking. We have managed to decrease picking time by providing automated order batching based on commodity groups, product images and product information to the pickers, guided product location and automated replacement recommendations. Our tool is supported with barcode scanners to increase the accuracy of the picking process. Picking efficiency metrics are key motivators for the pickers, increasing their speed of picking inside the store or darkstore.

Transaction Process:

Digital Foodie supports integrations to various POS solutions. POS integration enables the fulfilled order to be transferred electronically to the store’s system for recording sales. One can easily imagine the time required for transaction process without POS integration: products are handled twice with picking and scanning. Retailers can of course survive without POS integration, but it will mean added costs and will make the path towards profitability more challenging.

Home Deliveries:

Click & Collect vs. Home Delivery is always a good question to ask in the beginning when planning the grocery eCommerce service. Click & Collect is easier to organize, but in some areas this might not serve consumers’ weekly shopping enough for retailer to reach the required amount of business online. To maximize the efficiency in home deliveries, Digital Foodie has developed tablet based tool for planning the routes for the deliveries in real time. Planning orders to different routes or assigning drivers is as easy as dragging a file from one folder to another in your PC. Of course the customer support is able to follow the deliveries in real time.

User Experience

The user experience is everything in the online world; retailers can bring the same level of focus to the online customer experience as they do to the physical in-store experience. Customers today have the ability to connect anywhere and anytime with their mobile devices. Retailer’s eCommerce service should support fully responsive website and most preferably native mobile apps. Millennials and digital generations are using their mobile devices 24/7. We at Digital Foodie are experts in developing mobile apps and focus in mobile user experience is always part of the implementation processes. In order to provide consumers with store-like experience online, Digital Foodie supports loyalty programs, promotions, bundles and e-circulars. We support also real-time product assortments and pricing views so retailer’s online offerings are always the same as in store, unless otherwise decided. Without good quality product data and imagery, the online experience might not be close to the in-store experience. To support retailer with integration between the two experiences, Digital Foodie has a team of professionals who can solve this issue by offering photo-shoot services of additional products as well as private label products. Product images can be instantly moved online and complement the existing assortment. Digital Foodie also has simple PDM tool to manage product details and blacklist in real-time. We have also recently partnered with leading MDM and PIM provider EnterWorks.

Branding

We know how important the brand is for the retailer and how much it affects loyalty of the customers. That’s why we provide retailers with pure white-labeled solution. Retailer’s online service is always branded for the retailer. Retailer takes on all operational responsibility related to offering online shopping as well as fulfillment and delivery of the products. Last mile services will take retailers brand to the customer door. We provide the all tools to make it possible to launch branded and profitable on-demand grocery service.

Download the CART supermarket eCommerce Guide in http://www.advancingretail.org/resources/cart-supermarket-ecommerce-guide

More about CART in

http://www.advancingretail.org/