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How Grocery Stores can Increase their Revenues by Offering Home Delivery Services

How Grocery Stores can Increase their Revenues by Offering Home Delivery Services

Reading time: About 5 minutes

One big change the on-going lockdown has brought about is that more people are shopping for groceries online. People who were habituated with store shopping for groceries suddenly are forced to consider the online shopping option because of lockdown and to limit going outdoors.

Since groceries are essential, people have no other option but to continue making this routine purchase despite the lockdown restrictions. In India, even though grocery stores were allowed to remain open under stipulations, online grocery shopping has witnessed a tremendous spike. This also resulted in a proportionate rise in demand for home delivery services.

With this, grocery stores and supermarkets have a big gap to fulfil – add home delivery services.

Grocery shopping is going online and many big online grocery retailing firms with deep pockets are intensifying their efforts in this direction. However, these big firms are operating only in selected cities and particularly, the metropolitan cities. Secondly, understand that if you are a grocery retailer, then you have a distinct advantage over the big online players in the form of trust and confidence of the local customer base.

In this post, we shall try to highlight how home delivery service can help grocery stores increase their business and generate more revenue.

Enhance Customer Experience

In the post-lockdown world, customers will prioritize distancing and avoiding crowded places like grocery stores or departmental stores. The safety precautions put in place by these stores will increase the time taken to complete the shopping. Other existing reasons like standing in long queues for checkouts and traffic menace will continue to remain as deterrents. If you can provide a home delivery service, then you will save your customers from all these hassles and enhance customer experience. This will further aid in developing customer loyalty as people normally would not prefer to shift from a brand that is providing a better and convenient shopping experience.

With a push to digital transactions brought about by the COVID-19 crisis, you can provide online payment options to your customers to make their shopping further convenient and contact-free.

Serve the Society Especially the old, sick, or the Disabled People

According to a United Nations report, the number of people aged above 60 years is expected to double by 2050. Furthermore, in the on-going COVID-19 crisis and lockdown situation, home delivery of essentials like groceries and medicines will come as a big relief to the old, sick, or the disabled people. This is not about business but is a common responsibility for all. And for a grocery or any other essentials store, it is an opportunity to serve the less-privileged sections of the society.

However, businessmen also need to ensure their safety as well as that of their employees in the store as well as while carrying out the home delivery services.

Home-makers can Invest Quality Time into other Activities

With home delivery services, the homemakers can save a lot of time that they normally spend shopping for groceries. This will have a huge impact on their daily lives as they will be able to invest more time into other activities. Maybe they can pursue that foregone hobby or they can spend more time with their children.

Homemakers constitute a huge market segment. Once a value relevant to them is created and delivered it can solidify the existing customer base for an enterprise and also attract new customers for it. And also, grocers need to always bear in mind that in the purchase of groceries, the homemakers are the real decision-makers. They decide which groceries to purchase and from where. By providing value to them in the form of home delivery service, grocery stores can improve their business and revenues.

In planning for initiating home delivery service, grocery stores need to take into consideration the following:

Relevant Business Technology

Let us understand the importance of business-technology with the help of a hypothetical example of two shopkeepers A and B who adopt different approaches.

Shopkeeper A starts home delivery service by telling his customers that they can call him and place their orders. He soon finds out that the model is not working. Why? Firstly, calling to place bulk orders can be awkward, time-consuming, and prone to misunderstandings. Secondly, the number of orders will be limited to the number of business phone numbers. This can be further limited when there are network issues. This also means more staff will be required to take more orders. Thirdly, grocers will not have the opportunity to showcase his merchandise.

Without the aid of technology, even the delivery process will be manual for shopkeeper A. The delivery staff will have to rely on paper/slip/notes containing the bill, the address to be delivered, phone number, etc. This is how it has worked traditionally for many conventional grocery stores. But with the availability of technologies for business, conventional ways of working have become out-dated in many ways.

On the other hand, shopkeeper B invests in IT systems and builds an integrated platform for customers and backend order management and order fulfilment.

The model worked great for his business. Any number of customers can place any number of orders at any time of the day in a matter of minutes. It eliminates the chances of errors in order placing. No extra staff is now required for taking orders. Also, within the mobile app, customers can view the entire range of merchandise providing an opportunity of upselling and cross-selling.

Once an order is ready for delivery in the store, the details are updated in the platform to be further used by the logistics team for carrying out the home delivery.

By investing in creating a business-technology platform, grocery stores can ensure that their business operations are efficient, effective, and accurate.

SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)

Irrespective of the size and scale of business, SOPs are for everyone.

With SOPs in place, the employees of a grocery store will know what to do once an order is triggered, the allotted time frame, the expected output, who will be the next to carry the process further, and so on. From order acknowledgement to delivery, every activity will be laid down in a step-by-step manner.

Moving into the future of brick and mortar grocery business, home delivery service will be an inseparable component of any grocery store business plan. Whether in-house or with the help of retail grocery consultants, grocery businesses will have to figure out how to enhance value to customers.

 

PROCESS AUTOMATION

The idea of having Ecommerce Consultants on-board from the beginning itself points towards reducing the involvement of the promoters in daily operations. Ecommerce Businesses willing to be a brand reaping profits & sustaining the competition must ensure that most of their processes should be automated. The more the manual intervention, the more would be the errors.

In Ecommerce business, you get only 1 chance to impress the customer & if you mess up there, you lose the customer for long.

Process automation in respect to all the activities pertaining to customers from order receiving to order fulfilment is a must for a seamless experience for the customers.

Task Management is another grey area where most deadlines fail as 90% of the tasks are assigned manually & are forgotten, unheard, misunderstood or mistaken.

YRC Team of Ecommerce Management Consultants helps to make maximum of the processes system-driven to ensure minimalistic manual intervention.

VIDEOGRAPHY & PHOTOGRAPHY

No matter how good your product is, the customer would know only if it looks good.

Photography includes the following steps:

  • Cataloguing your products
  • Cataloguing your images
  • Backup your images (A few cloud storage solutions include Dropbox, Google Drive, Bitcasa, Apple’s Cloud Storage etc.)
  • Choose the right camera & lens (You may also outsource the photography to a third party agency)

DIGITAL MARKETING

Digital Marketing includes SEO & SMM. SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimization includes activities like back-linking, meta tags, blog-writing etc. to ensure your website ranks on the 1st page on Google Search.

Next comes SMM i.e. “Social Media Marketing” which as the name suggests including promoting your products on all the social media sites, email marketing, influencer marketing & several other BTL activities.

These activities are going to be recurring & would decide the traffic on the website, the conversions, whether the right target market is tapped, the likes, the views, the orders, the reviews & much more. YRCs Ecommerce Consultants create a budget for digital marketing right from pre-launch to launch & for each month thereafter.

Building digital marketing strategies in coordination with the agency, selecting them to signing them off would be the role of YRC.

This ensures seamless coordination, detailed interactions & desired execution as it is always advisable to work with a single agency than multiple of them.

IT INTEGRATION

Selection of the right software for smooth functioning of back-end operations right from production to webstore display would be suggested and integrated by YRC Team.

YRC’s Team defines SOPs of Product Movement, maps it with the locations & people. They then create a blueprint of all the features required in the software & help in shortlisting & selection.

IT Integration involves connecting your offline inventories with real-time online webstore so when a sale occurs, inventories get deducted real time across offline as well as online platforms.

This helps in accurate inventory management, maintaining the MOQs, re-order levels & achieving the optimum inventory levels.

Some popular software include unicommerce, viniculum for your front-end website management & Genisys for your entire back-end Purchase, Production, Accounting, Invoicing etc. management.

WAREHOUSE & LOGISTICS PLANNING

  • How many cities or countries you wish to sell in?
  • Where should your Warehouse be located?
  • Should you have one warehouse in each country or city?
  • Should you be having your own delivery team in your base city?
  • Would the 3rd party vendors be reliable? What happens when they lose or misplace your product during delivery?
  • How should I manage the logistics if my goods are coming from different countries?
  • How should the goods be stored and barcoded?
  • How much space do I require for warehouse?
  • I am sure several such questions must be haunting you while you think of starting your own fashion ecommerce brand.

 

At YRC, our warehousing and logistics experts can help you devise a strategy for all of the above mentioned queries and much more.

We design the layout of the Warehouse considering the inward, goods processing, software entry, barcoding, outward, goods return, scrap storage, goods stacking & much more.

Logistics route plan is devised considering the manufacturer to your warehouse and from there to last mile delivery locations.

UI & UX DESIGNING

This Step involves 03 distinct parts:

Part 1: Choosing the right Platform:

From several platforms available in the market right from Shopify to magento, woocommerce, prestoshop, wordpress etc. you must choose the one that fits best for your business

Part 2: UX Designing:

“UX” denotes User Experience, which if put in simple language is building the functional requirements of the website.

UX Designing includes designing the features required in the website, customer journey map, website features, the browsing features, navigation features, ecommerce order management process flow, checkout cart features, catalogue management, ecommerce payment system, cross selling features & much more.

“As per statistics, 68% of the customers abandon the carts before payment”

An interesting UX ensures the customer sticks on to the website for a longer time.

Part 3: UI Designing:

UI stands for User Interface, which means designing the look and feel of the website. UI includes using the right colours, elements and the entire aesthetics of the website.

A good User Interface ensures the user completes the task that he has come for. It navigates the user through the journey of the brand in the simplest but most effective way.

The UX designer maps out the bare bones of the user journey; the UI designer then fills it in with visual and interactive elements.

If User experience is the bare bone, user interface wraps it up with an attractive cape.

At YRC, our team if experts can help you develop the entire User Journey to ensure it is engaging!

SAMPLING & PRODUCTION

This step follows the “Designing” Phase, whether you have an in-house design team, freelance designers or an outsourced design company. It is one of the most exciting phases, as here you see your designs turning into products & your ideas turning into reality.

In most start-up cases, production is outsourced i.e. brands tie-up with the established manufacturers/ job-workers to get their products manufactured.

Sampling involves multiple 04 Stages, Fit-Sample, Prototype Sample, Pre-Production Sample & the Production Sample.

Prototype Sample is the first sample provided to the buyer. It can be in any fabric/ colour. This sample is just to understand whether the product design looks equally great in reality.

Fit Sample, as the name suggests is prepared to check the fit of the garment i.e. the various sizes, length, width etc.

Pre-production is made by the actual production line. Here the stitching quality and other aspects related to manufacturing are checked. This is the last stage where rejection can be accepted.

Production Sample is made before the production which is the replica of what is going to be finally produced.

Once you are through with all this, you are good to go ahead & get your goods manufactured.

PRODUCT DESIGNING / SOURCING

Product Designing or Sourcing is the heart of the Ecommerce Fashion Brand.

Product Designing / Sourcing can be done in several ways, as follows:

  • In-house Design Team
  • Freelance Designers
  • Outsourced Design Team
  • Ready Product Sourcing (From Manufacturer or Wholesaler)

At YRC, we evaluate your business strategy & business model to arrive at the decision, which of the above ways would be best-fit for your business. In certain cases, product sourcing may be a combination of the above.

These are the people who are going to build your brand! Whether they are the designers or merchandiser, your brand look is going to be in their hands.

If you are designing each garment from the scratch, the sourcing would play crucial role in developing design identity of your brand.

Sourcing includes fabric, trims, lining & all the raw material required to build the garment.

BRANDING

Branding is the “Look of the Brand”, right from logo to tagline, the colours used, the brand story, the brand communications on social media, the packaging & all the other aspects which speak directly or indirectly to the customers. Branding constitutes the look & feel of the brand & hence must be thoughtfully planned to match with the product that we are selling.

Branding must appeal to our target audience. Example : A golden colour logo depicting finesse, art, richness, premium, however beautiful it may be individually cannot go with a brand selling affordable kids wear products. So, your logo must be in-line with your brand positioning, whether you are an expensive brand or a luxury brand or a value for money brand, it must be depicted from your “Branding”.

It is an integral part to attract the target audience.

ORGANOGRAMS & SOP’s

Organogram is the “HR Blueprint” of the business which is created at the onset, to map out the team required across each function at various stages of the business. At the launch, only key people need to be got on board to ensure the project gets started & at this stage, all of them need to multi-task. Similarly, certain financial as well as operational goals are set for addition of the further team. Example, for the operations team, we hire 1 operations manager during the pre-launch phase & we add 1 more only when the business kicks-off & we reach a volume of selling more than 1000 pcs/ month or a turnover of more than 0.1 million USD.

SOPs are Standard Operating Procedures, a bible to run the entire organization right from Sales, Purchase, HR, Order receiving to Order fulfilment, Inventory Management, Accounts, Warehouse, Logistics, Supply Chain, Production & all the other relevant functions for the business. Business must be organized from its first day of operations; only then the tasks can be delegated.

At YRC, we design the organization structure, the processes, and approximate time taken to execute each process, job profile of every member within the organization, their KRAs, KPIs & the Reporting Structure.

CRITICAL PATHWAY

Critical Pathway Analysis (CPA), is a project management technique which cannot be overlooked while launching an ecommerce fashion brand. Brand launch process is cumbersome with multiple inter-dependent & time-bound tasks involved, which need to be tracked to ensure the project remains on track.

CPA outlines key tasks across the project, their turnaround time (TAT) & the dependencies of tasks upon each other. It identifies the sequence of tasks, their interdependent steps from inception to completion, their criticalities, and their dates of onset, target dates of completion along with the key responsible person for the respective activities. Critical Pathway helps in understanding the unimportant & not urgent tasks which may jeopardize the execution of the project because of an unexpected snag! It also maps out the potential bottlenecks which might be posed because of the dependencies of tasks upon each other & cases where the next task cannot be commenced before the completion of the previous one.

CPA detects the minimum & the maximum time involvement of a particular individual or team to execute the task, thereby arriving at the overall deadlines associated with the project.

At Your Retail Coach, we design the Critical Pathway & review it periodically to ensure the project is on track & the progress is measurable.

BUSINESS STRATEGY & BUSINESS PLAN

Business Strategy includes the vision, mission, goals, business model, business plan & strategy for all the functions within the organization.

Business Strategy is a well-defined plan that outlines who, what, where, why, how & when for the company; for example, who would be the target market, how to attract the target audience, when to launch new products, where to operate from, how to handle competitors, what would be the USP, what would be long term goal of the organization & several other answers to the 5Ws of Strategy.

Business Strategy aligns the organization towards a common goal. Business SWOT helps company to identify & overcome their weaknesses & focus to sharpen the strengths. Business strategy forecasts future risks and helps business in building skillsets to overcome the potential threats.

YRC’s Business Plan focuses on creating a “Blueprint” of the business, thereby deriving the feasibility of the concept & gauge whether the opportunity is lucrative to invest time, energy & effort. Business Plan creates cash flow understanding i.e. building inflow & outflow cash projections from Week zero to week 60 i.e. 05 year projection. Business Plan calculates the capital investment, operating costs, one-time costs, recurring costs & all the other numbers relevant to obtain the breakeven sales, return on investment, return on capital, internal rate of return & several other ratios. Business Plan is also one of the important requirements if you are targeting the “Investor Route”. Fund raising becomes extremely transparent & channelized. With business plan panned out clearly, the business will know until what point must it be stretched & where to stop, which reduces the probability of unplanned investments.

MARKET RESEARCH

Starting the concept of Ecommerce Fashion brand with Market Research ensures we get detailed understanding of the industry & this research report also acts as a social confirmation for your concept. Market Research helps in understanding the target locations, their population, potential online buyers for your product, competitors for each category, and top selling products of the competitors, competitors’ price range, offers & their responses & much more. Market Research helps in thorough understanding of your brand position as compared to our competitors. It helps in identifying gaps in the market, in your category along with the scope of the said product in the desired market. This will help in validation of your concept & prevents you from making the same mistakes as your fellow brands, eventually saving your time, energy & efforts. This phase is also a make or a break phase, as the market research study may at-times come up with some eye-popping numbers & statistics which might compel you to re-think on your product or category that you are planning to sell or alter your entire concept itself!! Market Research Reports analyse the competitors’ webstore for their traffic, conversion & sales. This is extremely valuable information to derive our inventory budgets & projections, which takes us to our next phase.