How To Grow Your Online Grocery Business Through Omnichannel Ecommerce

With consumer habits still evolving, traditional grocers have a unique opportunity to build an online store and thrive in the ecommerce industry.

Our generation is dependent on technology for almost everything. And online grocery business is not an exception. A few years back, the only outing venue for the working class on weekends used to be a grocery store. The good old process of choosing the products by walking through the store, standing in long queues for billing, and a lot more hassles. But not anymore.

With the extensive growth of online grocery business, omnichannel has also gained a lot of momentum.

Source: Harvard Business Review

Omnichannel approaches have become increasingly important as consumers’ behaviours are influenced through a combination of online research, in-store visits, social media, voice assistants, and more. It has created a demand to have an omnichannel presence to grow the online grocery business.

What is an omnichannel approach?

The multichannel approach has existed in retail for decades, but it has gained immense popularity recently. An omnichannel approach relates to offering multiple ways to buy a product or service. This approach offers enormous benefits to customers as well as retailers. It helps you to create your brand presence across multiple online and offline channels while ensuring a positive and seamless buying experience throughout the customer journey. So, if you are looking at winning customers for your grocery business, it is super important to adopt an omnichannel ecommerce approach.

Let’s understand how the omnichannel strategy helps to grow your online grocery business

1. Meet customers where they are

Consumers have been engaging in online buying and transactional activities for many years. And today, customers have diverted and dispersed across different channels. Earlier, the customer journey was quite linear but now, people discover new products, brands, and channels even if it is buying regular groceries. Omnichannel ecommerce allows you to be present on multiple channels like Facebook and Instagram ads, website, product reviews, and experience shopping on any device at any time. Showing up where your customers are makes the shopping journey more convenient for them.

2. Optimize your business with data and analytics 

With drastic changes in consumer behaviour, online businesses need to adjust sales and marketing channels to optimize according to the new reality. Understanding your data will help you understand the customers better and identify where and how to focus on them. With multiple channels of online grocery shopping, you can’t afford to be absent from any channel. The data relating to customer’s problems, behaviour and overall shopping journey help to create tailored D2C experiences on any device and channel. And you don’t need to make huge investments to provide an omnichannel experience. StoreHippo enables you to build an online store with omnichannel capabilities, centralize the data from multiple sources to meet the customers where they are and serve them in personalized ways.

3. Bridge the gap between online and in-store shopping

According to research by Nielsen, over 59% of grocery shoppers look for discount coupons on mobile devices before they visit the physical grocery store. And over 53% of grocery shoppers use mobile apps for online grocery shopping. Modern consumers do not consider your multiple sales channels as separate – and neither should you. Instead, the key focus should be to ensure a consistent brand experience, no matter where your customers choose to shop. With an omnichannel platform like StoreHippo, you can link the online shopping experiences with the in-store experiences with loyalty programs. You can reward your customers for online and offline shopping. And at the same time, the customers can also find detailed information about products, stock availability, store locations, and more.

4. Real-time inventory systems

Gone are the days when store staff asked customers to check out the stock later. When customers are shopping for groceries (online or offline), they need everything right away. And to fulfil this purpose, you need real-time inventory management. A real-time inventory system helps you to track the product movement between stores, home delivery couriers, and distribution centres. With an omnichannel ecommerce platform like StoreHippo, you can get complete transparency over the holding inventory and communicate this information to customers to avoid further disappointment.

5. Smart supply chains 

When you are dealing with multiple channels, it is important to have sync among all the channels. Whether it is feeding data insights from social media campaigns into inventory management systems or using customer information from mobile devices to create personalized promotions, omnichannel ecommerce platforms can do it all. StoreHippo is one such platform that allows you to build smart supply chains, create sync among different channels, and achieve a more streamlined operation. Additionally, you can give multiple options to customers like - Buy online and collect in-store, buy in-store and deliver to customer’s location.

6. Omnichannel marketing to stand out in the crowd

While the earlier era of marketing was limited to TV commercials, radio advertisements, billboards, modern marketers have endless options for marketing and getting their brand to stand out of the crowd. 

In the age of social media and voice shopping, grocery retailers need to build an online store that can create personalized messages across different marketing channels and deliver a consistent brand voice. For example, a customer is looking for a product and landed on your website, added the product to cart but didn’t purchase it. Now, you have sent a personalized email about the price drop on the same product but the customer has still ignored it. Then, you have shown a social media ad with a discount on the same product that you still didn’t buy. 

Now when you understand that the customer wants to visit the store physically, you send an email about visiting the offline store, he makes a visit and then after, orders the product on your website using mobile. Then, you have managed a home delivery and asked for feedback from the customer. This is how omnichannel ecommerce strategy works. 

Similarly, with StoreHippo, you can create a tech-focused marketing approach to unlock the power of customer data, provide online and offline choices to customers, and boost your business growth. 

7. Enhanced customer support

In today’s interactive world, you cannot imagine running a business without excellent customer support. For example, if a customer asks for support over the phone and then visits a customer service desk at the store, they should not face the problem of explaining the same problem again and again. 

It is important to build an online store with omnichannel support to share the relevant information across all channels and deliver a seamless customer experience. Along with customer support, you can also provide interactive features where shoppers can ask for recipe suggestions, and receive personalized advice for individual dietary requirements. When the customer's online experiences are improved, they are more likely to visit the stores as well that ultimately help you to grow your business.

How is StoreHippo the best platform to support all your omnichannel ecommerce needs?

Now when you know that using omnichannel strategy can help your online grocery store grow like never before, it is the right time to enter into the bandwagon. Well, you need not worry about huge IT investments because StoreHippo offers inbuilt headless commerce architecture to support all your omnichannel needs.

Online grocery is now mainstream and set to stay that way, you need to prioritize and acknowledge the importance of omnichannel in mind. You need to start thinking about omnichannel to boost your online as well as in-store sales. But to achieve the same, you need to select an ecommerce platform that will help you develop a cutting-edge online grocery store. 

StoreHippo gives you all the freedom to expand your business and think beyond the horizon with 300+ inbuilt features and pocket-friendly costs. The headless architecture of the platform allows you to create, handle and deliver content from a single place while serving customers in a personalized manner. StoreHippo helps you to establish a unique enterprise ecommerce identity with 250+ API endpoints to customize the themes, order flow, payment process, checkouts etc. 

These features will increase customer traffic, enhance your sales, and grow your business. To see all these amazing features in action, schedule a free online trial store and be a part of the omnichannel ecommerce revolution with StoreHippo.