Make A Good Start With An Online Grocery Store With A Lower Investment…
It would be an interesting topic to delve deep into it as there has been a drastic change in the perceptions, buying habits, demands, and types of products and standards of living of people across the globe in recent decades. This is the reason why it has attracted a number of big businesses to ponder over it very seriously and has compelled them to build an online grocery store. With noticeable development in the areas of technology today, you have multiple technology platforms which offer a highly economical grocery store solution be it meant even for an online grocery store with a low investment. For example, there are amazing platforms like Magento and Shopify to build an online store and you can hire a qualified and experienced Magento developer to build the dream online grocery store of your choice.
If you are planning to start an online grocery business with a low investment, here are some insights that might be helpful to you for setting up a successful online grocery store in 2023.
“According to a survey, it is believed that by the year 2024, 70% of grocery purchases will be made online.”
It implies the trend of buying online is going to increase as compared to the scenario in the previous era when offline window shopping was the most common thing. Once you have made it up to create an online grocery store, then you should first have an in-depth idea about;
- What Exactly do Consumers Want?
- What Are The Demographic Impacts?
- The volume of the market share of various products
- The Prominent Consumers’ Income Groups, and above all
- Whether they are willing to spend for their convenience and prefer off-time delivery of products!
Having considered the above basic factors, you can start with free delivery offer or a promotional discount on the first purchase made by the consumer. It might be surprising but true that online stores or mobile applications have elevated small grocery businesses to get about 70% more consumers than the offline stores and they have been able to generate 48% more revenue than the offline stores. This is mainly because of the competent teams and strategic endeavour made by the companies like LevelUP. It is always a very challenging attempt to take to take an online store to the destination where the target consumers can give you more revenue.
You will notice in the above diagram that the sales in the year 2020 were approximately 24 billion USD which increased to 50 Billion USD in the span of just two years. This is mainly because of the shift in the buying habits of people to the online store.
What You Should Think First Before Starting An Online Grocery Business?
At the outset, it is important to observe the online grocery shopping habits of people and then you can move on to other factors like,
- Potential target market
- Analysing the competitors’ market stand
- Prominent delivery areas
- Website and mobile application for the online grocery store.
Similarly, you should have an effective business model that can roll on well in the grocery industry and it should be capable enough to transform your business into an efficient, consistent, and precise grocery business model.
To help you understand it, team LevelUP has segregated an ideal model online grocery business. Here you will find the ease of navigation for a consumer as well as a business owner for his online grocery delivery business.
7 Easy Ways to start an Online Grocery Store
It is not enough to have a demand for your product in the market but your product should have a repeat demand in the market and that makes a sizeable difference in the growth of a business. The grocery market is one such market with huge possibilities of Repeat Demand. That’s why running an online grocery business is always productive and profitable. However, you need to follow certain steps precisely well to roll on well in the industry.
- Know Your Customers:
This is perhaps the most crucial as well as challenging step that you need to solve right from the beginning. Here, you need to identify and categorize the consumers according to their requirements. For example, some consumers might need faster delivery of household products whereas there will be consumers working at different places seeking some light snacks. Once the segmentation of the customers is finalized, then you can think of buying the stock of products and categorize them for their ease. It will benefit you to fix your marketing strategies, season based promotion of products and will also ensure precise data of customers’ buying habits, income groups, their choices, etc. There are companies like LevelUP which provide meaningful and detail analytics to form your marketing strategies.
- Product Categorisation:
Usually, the purchases of groceries online are made by more than any one family member. This is mainly because of the different requirements of the same family. Therefore, your online grocery store should have a very up to date categorization of different products from cosmetics to the kitchen. The consumer always expects to have all their choices of commodities under the same roof and that too at economic rates. Hence, it is not merely the Listing of the Products enough but they should be properly categorized with ease of navigation.
- Identify the delivery region:
This is also one of the important steps to start the online grocery store as at this juncture, you need to fix the sources to supply the groceries ordered, in other words, you have to finalize whether you wish to do business within domestic or international areas. However, much depends on the kind of the range of products you offer to your customers. For example, if you intend to sell vegetables and other such edibles, you need to fix the resources locally, and similarly in the case of grains and other grocery items you need to affiliate with other online grocery delivery solutions. However, we can sum it up shortly as setting up an office, warehouse for storage, to affiliate with local businesses to cope with the orders in case of the perishable type of commodities.
Having fixed the areas you wish to serve, you should also plan for developing your online grocery stores based on the above criterion.
- Competition Analysis:
Any business can survive or sustain longer only if it follows a regular SWOT analysis. The term ‘SWOT’ stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats. It is better to have a deep idea about the stand of the leading market players and you can get it by answering certain basic questions like:
- What products of your competitors are popular?
- Why do consumers prefer them?
- The impact of the factors like Price, Product Quality, Services, Delivery, Payment, Security, Data, etc.
- Your rivals’ approach to consumers.
- Offers, discounts, supply chains, and seasonal offers.
- The pattern of websites, navigation, and ease of use in terms of UI/UX.
- Planning and Developing online grocery store:
The success of any online store largely depends on the kind of technology platform it is built on. There are a number of companies offering services for developing web and mobile applications for online grocery stores. And let me put it that this process starts with the appropriate domain name – a virtual address of the online store or website. The domain should reflect in one or another way the business of the company and should be short, SEO friendly, and catchy enough to utter.
Having finalized the domain, you can start with the online grocery store development process. The most prominent online grocery store development platforms are Magento, WordPress, BigCommerce, VirtueMart, PrestaShop, Shopify, etc. For better results, you can have a brief discussion in process consulting with online store developers the way you want to develop your store before you initiate the development process. Today, most prominent companies like LevelUP provide the best development processes as well as even technical support after the development process is over.
In the same way, you can also opt for developing a mobile application for your online grocery store on the most popular platforms like iOS and Android. Considering the range of your products and the budget constraints, you can hire Android developers or iOS developers to craft the mobile app for your online grocery store.
You should also consider one more important factor while crafting your online store – Checkout and Payment Methods. Payment gateways should be safe and tightly secure with an ease of making the payment either through debit/credit card, online payment UPIs, or COD (Cash on Delivery) methods.
- Ease of Navigation:
Most consumers leave an online store website just because they don’t find it easily what they are looking for. It happens mainly because of the pattern of navigating the website. When someone lands on your website, he/she should be able to find easily the product he is looking for. Hence, an ideal grocery store should have easy categorization of the products in terms of navigation and checkouts.
- Designing Marketing Strategy:
The virtual business in fact starts only after your website goes live. You may have the best brands with you but they are good for nothing until it reaches the right person. This is where the true journey of your online store begins. It is the social media platforms, communities, influencers, reviewers, and various digital marketing tools you will need to give a thrust to your online store. And for it, you will need a dedicated team of SEO and Digital Marketing professionals who understand your business well and can design a better online marketing strategy for your online store. You must choose a trusted SEO agency that can assist you to increase the conversion rates on your websites and minimum bounce rates.
How Much Cost You Will Have To Bear To Develop An Online Grocery Store And Mobile App?
There may not be any pre-fixed answer to this question as it largely depends on various factors like the range of products, the client’s budget, the features, functionalities, and facilities to be integrated into the store, and the selection of the technology platform.
However, a rough estimation for building a white-labeled online store can cost around $3000-$5000 and if you wish to customize it with some advanced features, the cost may rise according to the kind of customization you want. Usually, these costs include post-deployment technical assistance for about 3 months.
Conclusion:
As stated at the outset, Grocery is such a bunch of commodities that ensure you a repeat demand and people across the globe are diverting more and more to online shopping of grocery items. So, it can be concluded that developing an online grocery store is undoubtedly a very good business idea in today’s dynamics.
However, business owners need to be precise about how they can translate their ideas into reality irrespective of the challenges it might have in terms of technology, time, and cost.
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