People don’t want to visit supermarkets to buy groceries these days because there are many options for them to buy their grocery items and get them delivered at their doorsteps.
Are you too looking to develop an e-commerce store for grocery supplies? If yes, then this blog post may help you a lot.
Developing a grocery e-commerce website is no more a big deal. Moreover, you can use any of the reliable CMS platforms like WordPress to build your online store. There is no complication at all.
But the real challenge lies in getting more sales & customers for your e-commerce website, especially in a competitive market.
In this blog post, I’ve shared 9 essential features that your grocery e-commerce store must have in order to get more sales, which means more revenue and more profit.
Let’s get started.
#1 Multiple payment options
Limited number of options to pay at any e-commerce store is perhaps one of the major reasons of high abandonment rate of its orders. Which means the users may have added the products to their cart but never completed their order because of the unavailability of their preferred payment method.
Don’t let this happen to your online grocery store.
Don’t just think from your own point of view or your website developer’s perspective.
Think about your customers. You must do a research about the prevailing payment methods in your targeted region.
Perhaps having a thorough look at one of your competitors’ website may help you to find out the most common payment gateways that your targeted audience prefer to pay with.
Once you know the prevailing payment methods in your targeted region, you can ask your website developer to incorporate with your grocery website too.
#2 Product return
Want to multiply your grocery sales? Allow your customers to return the products in case of any damage or similar problems.
It’s very well said that in order to make more sales, you have to overcome the objections of your customers. And believe me, most of the customers are hesitant to buy online just because they think they won’t be able to return the product if it’s not as per their expectations.
Although you can define your own terms & conditions for product returns, which most of the e-commerce companies do, but having this feature is a must thing.
Below are 4 most common reasons why do customers return the products that they ordered:
- They received wrong item or different item than they had ordered.
- They ordered wrong item by mistake.
- They received the item too late.
- The product was damaged.
#3 Save cart
Usually a single grocery order may contain several products because every house needs dozens of grocery items almost every week.
Sometimes, it may be troublesome for the users to place the order at the same time when they are adding the products to their cart.
Because they may want to add some more items to their cart in the near future, before they finally hit that checkout button.
Therefore, your e-commerce website must allow them to save their carts so that they can retrieve it later and add more items to it effortlessly. Once they are satisfied with their shopping cart, they can finally checkout by paying online.
#4 Discount coupons
Do you want to attract more and more new customers for your grocery store?
Issue discount coupons and float them on various social media platforms and spread them through email & SMS marketing.
If you look around, you may find that there are several competitors who are selling same stuffs as you do.
So what is it that differentiates your business from them?
If you can’t find the answer to this question, then you consider offering discount by creating a discount coupon and promoting it on various platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS etc.
If you don’t want to offer discounts to your existing customers because of your low profit margin, you can also create discount coupons that should be applicable to the first order of new customers only.
Below are some of the major benefits of discount coupons:
- More sales
- More customers
- Word-of-mouth recommendations
- Increased brand awareness
- Mass exposure
#5 Reordering
As we all know that most of the grocery items are required by every household almost every week or month or sometimes even everyday, it does make complete sense to enable your customers to reorder their previous orders or carts.
When your customers have the option to reorder their previous products, they can place new orders in a fraction of seconds. Which means it will be more convenient for the users to place their repeated products.
What will be your benefit with the reordering system?
Well, you will get more sales & loyal customers at no additional marketing cost or effort.
#6 Referrals & rewards system
Is there any lucrative offer that you are giving to your customers?
Ok, let us put it this way.
Your customers have to buy their grocery items anyhow. Whether they buy from your website or other stores, it doesn’t matter for them.
The only thing that may matter to them is what additional benefit do they get from you.
If you can provide some additional benefits like loyalty points or referral schemes so that your customers can not only buy their grocery items from you, but they can also save some money or sometimes even earn some money, nothing will be like it.
By offering such programs, you can bind your customers to buy from your e-commerce store.
Here are some unbeatable benefits of offering rewards systems on your online store:
- Your customers stop comparing your price with your competitors.
- Your customers develop a long-term relationship with you.
- Every time your customers place their orders, they feel motivated to save money.
- Your customers feel that you really care for them.
The best part of referrals & reward points system is that they are automated. You don’t have to manage them manually.
However, you may need to hire a web developer in order to incorporate these systems according to your requirements and preferences.
After that, everything becomes automated.
#7 Easy Signup/Registration
Complicated signup process is also one of the major factors for high order abandonment rate of any e-commerce website.
If you are a frequent online shopper, you may probably know how troublesome it is on some websites to signup or register. And I am sure that on some occasions you may also have decided to quite a website if it’s eating too much of your time just to register with them.
Don’t let this happen to your website visitors.
If you really want to get more customers & more sales from your online grocery store, you must have a hassle-free registration process. It shouldn’t take more than a minute to complete the signup form for the new users.
Make your signup process complicated and you are surely on the way to getting low sales.
Here are 5 useful tips to make your registration process easier:
- Ask for necessary information only.
- Provide social login options for a hassle-free checkout experience.
- Make sure that your website builder has checked the form validations properly.
- Ensure the responsiveness of your signup form.
- Use nice and easy-to-read fonts and attractive buttons.
#8 Monthly shopping list reminder
Grocery items are required on monthly basis and this is applicable on more than 60% of the households. Given this fact, wouldn’t it be better for your grocery website to remind the users about their upcoming monthly shopping list?
Although this feature may require some additional web development work, but you will get several benefits such as:
- The customers can easily place their orders with you every month.
- You can be in touch with your customers every month.
- You get to know about the estimated sales of your e-commerce store every month.
- You get to know about the required inventory that you need to maintain for your customers according to their shopping lists.
- It makes the user-experience of your website much better.
- Very few grocery store are doing this as of today, so you will get a competitive advantage too.
#8 Membership
Last but not the least, you must have a membership feature on your grocery e-commerce website.
You can allow your existing customers to become your members and get some additional benefits like monthly discount or free shipping which non-members don’t get.
There are certain other benefits of building your membership list, some of them being below:
- You get loyal customers who will buy from you regularly.
- You can send out new offers and product arrivals to your members, which means you can do direct marketing with your members.
- You can define certain threshold like minimum order amount every month to retain their membership. So, you get more sales.
- Your customers get special discounts and offers when they become your members. In return, they can do word-of-mouth marketing for you.