How to Keep Online Grocery Shopping Local
Expansive choice, doorstep delivery with zero investment: Moving from dream to reality.
Offering local shoppers expansive choice beyond what’s on your shelves, free doorstep delivery, and your branded shopping experience beginning to end may seem like a futuristic daydream or a page out of a national online retailer’s strategy playbook.
But for many independent retailers, the day for that dream to become a reality has arrived. Now there’s a path to affordably capture a bigger wallet share - and the smiles and loyalty - of your local shoppers being wooed away by online behemoths.
Ending the ‘Big Box Bail-Out’
Let’s say you have a long-time, loyal customer who loves shopping at your store, discovers your eCommerce site, downloads your app, and becomes a coveted ‘hybrid shopper’ - shopping online and in your local brick and mortar store.
There’s just one glitch: The ‘big box bail-out’. This customer loves finding new or unusual items for their grocery buys, but often those items aren’t stocked in your store. So, your usually-loyal customer bails from your website, goes to a big national retailer’s site and finds what they are looking for - with free doorstep delivery included. Sure, it’s impersonal, and they’d rather buy local, but they got what they needed.
You’d love to offer the same type of expanded choice and convenient delivery, but competing with a virtually endless aisle of selection and sophisticated delivery systems is simply out of the question for a store your size.
At least, it always has been…until now.
Endless shopping, doorstep delivery
Now there’s Choice Doorstep™, a new online service that provides a vastly expanded online shopping experience for your local shoppers that will keep them engaged with your brand for all their grocery shopping.
This new service allows you to instantly offer a large assortment of ship-to-home grocery products through your existing retailer-branded website and mobile app. ShopHero does all the work, you collect a margin on every sale with no resource investments on your end.
There’s no need for your shoppers to leave your site and search big box retailers for expanded, hard-to-find items.
In addition to the items currently available in-store, your online shoppers can browse thousands of hard-to-find products, including ambient, refrigerated and frozen items, made available from ShopHero's growing network of manufacturers and suppliers.
How It’s Different
In a nutshell, Choice Doorstep provides 3 distinct benefits for grocers wanting to provide an endless shopping experience for their customers:
- Enhances choice beyond your shelves. Offer tens of thousands of items not stocked on your shelves in a seamless online shopping experience through your website or app.
- Keeps online shopping local. Capture more of your local shoppers' wallet share with this seamless extension of your branded website. Shoppers stay with your brand for all their grocery shopping instead of migrating to national big box sellers.
- Increases revenues with zero overhead. There is no inventory to stock, no delivery or pickup to manage. ShopHero does the work, you collect a margin on everything that sells through your online store.
How It Works
Choice Doorstep dramatically enhances and expands your customers’ choices with zero investment on your part. Now you can offer an endless shopping experience that will keep your local online shoppers from defecting to big box retailers, and put extra margin on your bottom line.
Choice Doorstep items are seamlessly added to your eCommerce site, and are included in shopper searches and selection options along with your regular in-store items. Search ranking and placement can be managed for optimal shopper experience.
At checkout, in-store pickup or delivery items are listed separately from doorstep delivery Choice Doorstep items, but the entire order is paid in one transaction through your existing merchant checkout process. In-store items are picked and prepped as they currently are, and Choice Doorstep items ship directly to the shopper's home without any additional intervention on your part. It's that easy.
Already Have an eCommerce System?
Choice Doorstep is provided as part of the ShopHero eCommerce platform, giving instant access to this robust functionality. If you already have an eCommerce system, Choice Doorstep can easily be integrated with other providers’ technology to expand choice and convenience for your shoppers.
Your shoppers enjoy a smooth, expanded shopping experience with your brand beginning to end. Choice Doorstep items are displayed seamlessly along with in-store items in your branded website through the interface your shoppers are accustomed to.
Wow Your Local Shoppers Today
Independent grocery retailers can now fully participate in cutting edge technology and delivery that will impress local shoppers who are being conditioned to expect virtually endless selection and doorstep delivery. Why not surprise and delight them with dramatically enhanced choices and quick doorstep delivery all from the local grocery store they know and trust?
Rather than bailing and defaulting to big national sellers’ online stores, your local shoppers will be telling each other, “Oh yeah, that specialty four alarm barbeque sauce you couldn’t find in the store last week? Apple Hills Market around the corner has it on their new online shopping app - plus about a million other great products. I don’t know how they do it, but it comes right to your door. That’s why I shop there.”
Now is the time.
For more information visit https://about.shophero.com/choicedoorstep
