What should you start with when launching a marketplace? This is a common issue for most marketplace beginners known as the chicken and egg problem. In this post we will share the problems faced by marketplace giants like Uber, AirBnb, Lyft, Etsy and others. You can use their experience to solve the marketplace dilemma for you.
Grocery online marketplace is what can help people to order food remotely during COVID-19. That is the reason why this kind of business is at the peak of popularity.
The total number of supermarkets in the U.S. has remained around 38,000 for several years. ‘Supermarket food sales hit an estimated 447 billion U.S. dollars in 2018, which accounted for nearly 60 percent of the U.S. retail grocery market.’
Statista
In this article, we will examine what are the best examples of the grocery shops selling online, specifics of selling groceries online and what you can do with your Multi-Vendor or CS-Cart to repeat the industry leaders’ success.
Grocery shop list: the best examples
Best grocery delivery services as of 2020:
Instacart
Walmart Grocery
FreshDirect
Peapod
Google Shopping
Shipt
Prime Now
Prime Pantry
Beelivery: Grocery Delivery
Safeway Delivery & Pick Up
Dunzo: Delivery App for Grocery, Food & more
Shipt: Same Day Delivery
Publix Delivery & Curbside
Walmart InHome Delivery
goPuff: Drink & Food Delivery.
Local Express
Mercato
NetCost Market
What should you consider before launching your online grocery marketplace
This type of site has its own characteristics you need to take into account to provide the best user experience. An online grocery store usually have:
Large number of commodity items;
Challenged tracking of stock balances;
Ordering by weight and specific unit measurement;
Geolocation and display of the nearest stores;
Specific target audience:
Online shopping is mainly used by older and middle-aged working. They have less time to shop offline but they have credit cards to pay for their online orders. People of that age group do not often switch to product details, more often they simply add to the cart from the catalog, completing their shopping lists or repeating previous orders, and arranging home delivery.
It is undesirable to overload the page with small elements. Instead it is better to use readable fonts and visualization means to highlight items with color. For aged people, it is more convenient to receive SMS rather than an e-mail.
Use of step-by-step navigation and checkout.
Use of Assistive technology: items designed specifically to help people with vision loss or other disabilities, including screen readers or screen magnifiers and other devices for reading and writing with low vision.
Tip: Google Analytics Enhanced eCommerce can help with estimating the age of the target audience to adjust your UX/UI elements.
Features to leverage grocery shop performance
Geolocation, stores near you and pick up from store
Although pickup in store is available by default starting from 4.10.1 version of CS-Cart, you can expand this functionality with other useful features.
Add a popup to your homepage prompting buyers to choose their location or add automatic location identification.
Wegmans store
You can also allow your vendors to specify their time slots when customers can pick up their orders from them. Our add-on Vendor Business Hours will be helpful for this task. But you can go further and add an option to indicate the amount of orders vendors can fulfil within the established hours. Once the available maximum time slot is exceeded, the option to choose this vendor pick up point won’t be feasible for the customers. This feature will save a lot of time for your vendors and can potentially improve your customer satisfaction as they won’t have to wait in long queues.
You can allow your customers to see their location on the map and the closest pick up points. But the issue is where to place this map. It can be placed on the vendor page or right on the homepage. Also, a selector of the delivery method (delivery or pick-up) can be indicated on the same page.
TaxJar calculations
As your vendors can ship their groceries to customers from different states where tax accounting may vary, you should define an appropriate tax accounting software that automatically considers all the legal issues with taxes. We have the TaxJar Calculator to arrange the tax calculations dependent on the state automatically. In that case, the marketplace admin or vendors can specify their API keys (TaxJar account required) to connect nexus for the active states where the business is run and apply the required sales taxes.
Minimum order
If you do your business mostly online, you may need to specify the minimum order amount to ensure that the cost of shipping the order is worthwhile for your business. A minimum order is the smallest order amount in one delivery to spread delivery costs over an economical number of units. You can enter this amount allowed to complete checkout. If the order total is below the minimum, a notification will be displayed and customers will have to continue purchasing in your store until the required sum is achieved.
Connect grocery order delivery services, GPS tracking, and payments
Our study of the most downloaded food delivery apps shows that Postmates, Uber Eats, GrubHub, Doordash, and Deliveroo are among the leaders in industry. So, we analyzed some features provided by those apps to share them with you so that you could connect a grocery delivery service via API.
Look at Zomato API. It offers data about over 1.5 million restaurants in 10,000 cities over the globe. Their API allows searching for restaurants by their names, cuisine and location. Connecting this or similar functionality service to your CS-Cart/Multi-Vendor, you can get a list of nearby restaurants with all their details such as their rating, address, and menu.
Take the Postmates example. It uses Foursquare’s Places API to fetch restaurant listings and show them to customers.Their app is integrated with the local search and discovery service known as Foursquare. With the help of their API, users can search for menu, price, and meals.
A must-have feature connected with a modern grocery store is the advanced filtering system allowing visitors to specify their preferences and health limitations.
You can also include delivery tips for drivers when the order is delivered to the customers’ doors. This also can be implemented through customization of the standard functionality. Your customers will see a widget prompting them to leave a predetermined sum if they want to recompense the driver for the service.
Estimated delivery time
It would be nice if you could give your clients an idea of the time when their orders will arrive. Take a look at Pizza Hut and Postmates. They provide this feature to customers to tell the exact delivery times. You can use our add-on Shipping Estimate for this purpose.
Payments
We suggest you provide as many payment methods as you can in addition to the default CS-Cart ones (PayPal, Stripe Connect, Ping++, SagePay, and WorldPay).
You can connect Apple and Google Pay, Payeezy, or Braintree Marketplace Gateway to let users pay by credit or debit card and accept payments via Visa or Mastercard.
Geolocation
Uber was among the first apps who offered on-demand delivery services. Other companies like Deliveroo, Postmates, and Doordash followed their example and adopted a similar delivery tracking technology. With your CS-Cart/Multi-Vendor platform you also have an opportunity to add GPS tracking to determine the user location. This feature is very convenient to show the driver location to your customers and provide them with a great user experience.
Based on the type of devices, use either CoreLocation framework (iOS) or Google’s Geolocation API (Android) to define a geographic region and monitor movements of the drivers.Then, connect MapKit or Google Directions API to provide driving directions. Finally, you will need to integrate a mapping software like Google Maps or TomTom’s NavApp or rely on the Waze Transport SDK. All of them are good if you want to please both the web and mobile users.
Selling product by weight
A peculiarity of selling food online is its weight. You can’t exactly say what will be the weight of a chop unless your vendor cuts it. To tackle this issue within your shopping software, you can indicate an estimated total weight with its price and then withdraw the exact amount once the order is delivered.
.
Closing
The list of possible customization to cater for the online grocery ship development can be endless. But with the best examples and our experience, you can start gradually implementing them into your CS-Cart or Multi-Vendor software. Hopefully, some of the features are available through default functionality or via an add-on. If you need a more advanced technology or logic being implemented in your grocery store, rely on our 15-year web development experience.
Online stores and marketplaces having more than 500 000 products in their inventories may load slower. No matter how good your division into categories or site navigation is. Everything is now searched including online stores. Search is a faster solution when items are too much. The default CS-Cart architecture uses MySQL database search engine. If you want to handle the requests faster, you will have to either optimize searches with the default search or hook up another search engine software. In this post, we will examine some alternatives to the default CS-Cart search engine and their distinctive features.
This post tells about proper sharing of server accesses, who to trust and how to guess when a third-party developer is tricking you. You will get to know what kind of access to your server data can be and understand the cases when each type access is required.
With default CS-Cart features, you can sell goods online using the drop shipping model. However, while growing, you will need to expand your default functionalities. In this post, we will tell you how to improve your Multi-Vendor to turn it into a fulfilment system.
Have you ever thought about what you can do with a responsive theme design? Of course, responsiveness of your online store is the must-have for eCommerce to allow the site to look correctly on mobiles. But you can do more with that and take your mobile layout configuration to the next level. In this post, we examine some examples of what can be done on this matter.
This time we took an interview with add-on development experts. We asked them some questions about what types of mistakes brand owners usually make while trying to update add-ons, what are the most frequently updated plugins, and what are the success stories behind add-on upgrade.
This article is devoted to TikTok usage by eCommerce brands. Despite the recent dispute in the U.S., this social media platform still is one of the most popular entertainment sources with an audience exceeding 440 million people. Online retailers cannot leave it as it is. It’s time to use all the power of social media to boost sales on your eCommerce site.
This article is a checklist that will help you to optimize your eCommerce website for SEO. You will find lots of tips and examples on how to finetune your online selling platform and rank higher with Google.
Selling products by weight and volume is an easy task. Your software should be able to tackle the quantity issues. In addition to the software issues, there are also the legal problems for some liquids. Read this article to learn more about selling the most trending liquid and fractional goods.
With 3D images you can get more for your eCommerce business. 3D imaging is a state-of-the art way to showcase your item and find a shorter path to your customer’s heart. It helps to create a better image of your brand, reduce customer friction, and help customers to have an enjoyable stay on your webpage.
This post is about the features and benefits of having a PWA-based store for eCommerce brand owners. You will be introduced to the latest stats about using mobile apps to understand why having a native app is not such a good investment.
This article is about the latest trends for 2023 in the UX/UI and graphic design for eCommerce sites. You will know about the features to apply while designing your webstore to refresh its look-n-feel and improve the user experience.
If you run a massive inventory store consisting of more than 1,000 items, you probably know how difficult it can be to manage the catalog. But before expanding to a larger inventory store, it is very important to think of how to properly organize the catalog structure to make it searchable, driving, handy in use, and scalable. In this post, we share the best practices, tips and examples on creating a high-performing catalog!
This post will tell you about differences of having a mobile app and a PWA store. You will get to know what PWA technology is, how it does influence the online shopping, and what are the benefits or applying this technology for an eCommerce brand owner.
This post shares the best practices of finding first customers for a start-up owners. In addition to well-known recommendations, you will find the real stories of our customers who started their online businesses from scratch and succeeded in attracting their first clients to their CS-Carts and Multi-Vendors.
This article will guide you through options of self-customizing product page layouts to emphasize your brand uniqueness and increase conversions. You will get some tips, learn how to update the default templates, and see the best practices to instantly apply in your CS-Cart store or marketplace by yourself!
This post is all about voice search and voice assistants. It give some practical pieces of advice on how to use this Artificial Intelligence app for eCommerce purposes, as wel as possible drawbacks that an online retailer may encounter while using it.
The article deals with simple must have features to enable in your web store and/or marketplace to prompt sales and boost conversions. These rules are quite simple to forget when setting up your store. Having the checklist before your eyes will help you to quickly improve your eCommerce website selling power.
“How to attract vendors?” is the priority question a marketplace owner asks himself before launching his or her business online. We’ve collected some recommendations from the mature business owners and marketers about their methods for attracting vendors to their eCommerce platforms. Real merchants share what challenges they did face, what they did to overcome suspicion with their candidate partners, and win the battle for resellers!
