How can you give your customers a better eCommerce experience? The bottom line really comes down to having your customer buy the groceries that they need for their home, their business, restaurant or even a University cafeteria, hospital or whatever it might be.
The Complexity of Grocery eCommerce
In grocery category, probably more than in anywhere else, there is a need to get very granular about the things that I can eat, things that I want to eat, things that I won’t eat and then things that I shouldn’t eat at all. The journey begins with what I absolutely can’t have. If I have a raspberry, I’m going to swell up, my tongue is going to get going to get large and I’m going to die. Or a peanut, there’s so many allergies out there. So, there’s that component that I must address. But then it goes into preference component – I only prefer to eat name-brand food or I don’t want to eat any store brand products. It could also be that I have a specific diet I’m trying to keep like Keto, South Beach, Paleo or something else. I want foods that fit and match my particular diet. And then let’s talk about diversity in ethnic foods. In Houston, we have a very diverse population from all over the world and they are looking for foods from their homelands. We end up with a tremendous number of SKUs in this industry plus we add in the various options within each item of food as to what it is that I want to actually prefer and purchase.
What you end up with is a tiered search approach where I might start with ‘don’t show me anything with peanuts’. And then follow that with ‘show me the one with the highest amount of Vitamin C’ as I am trying to get a bunch of Vitamin C out of my nutrition right now. You start drilling down further and further with each step of your search within each item group or subset that you build.
What Makes For A Better eCommerce Experience?
Most grocers have built their own homegrown PIM, or Product Information Management system. And that has now gotten to the point where they can’t really manipulate it the way that they need to because they originally built it when they thought they only needed three categories and now they find they need 20. At that point, if they wanted to give their customers a better eCommerce experience the solution is either rewrite the whole thing or find something out there that will actually work in a way where they can go in and create new categories without limitations.
