Grocery commerce: putting customers first

Customer experience has always been at the very heart of grocery commerce. From being able to select a particular cut of meat at the deli counter, to weighing out the perfect portion of hand picked fruit or vegetables, grocery shopping is a sensory experience that consumers quite rightly get very selective about.

Our technology partner emporix gives useful insights into this topic.

Challenges for grocers

One of the toughest challenges facing grocers in the modern era of digital commerce is taking that experience and adapting it online.

For regular retailers, the transition to e-commerce can be fairly straight forward. All that’s needed is a website, a standard payment system and a courier solution.

For grocers, however, the transition is far more complicated. Particularly if the plan is to retain control and offer the same level of choice and experience to customers.

Items sold by weight, for instance, will need a smart pricing system that can adapt to different units of measurements, factoring in the base price, order price and also the cost of delivery.

A substitute system will also need to be implemented to the customer’s satisfaction, perhaps even allowing them to set their own preferences in terms of what items they are happy to be substituted when preferred choices are unavailable.

Logistics, freshness, picking and packing are yet more elements that can make a grocery business’ transition to e-commerce a complex process. There are simply too many variables and a lot of things that can potentially go wrong for a simple website to be enough.

Solutions for grocers

Thankfully, there are software solutions to this very unique problem. Built on state-of-the-art microservices architecture, futureproof ways for grocers are delivered to move their business online without compromising the customer experience.

Taking a headless commerce approach to the back-end elements of e-commerce allows grocery businesses to not only set up quickly, but set up in such a way that allows easy scalability and integration with various services. Everything is cloud-based, so there’s never any risk of outgrowing the platform, and new service elements like alternate payments can be added easily thanks to a robust API ecosystem.

Crucially, emporix headless commerce software allows grocers to retain complete control over their customer experience, completely tailoring all customer-facing aspects like websites and apps without losing any functionality.